How to Cut a Whole Chicken for Chicken Soup

Chef Desserae: Welcome to cooking to kids. Today I, Chef Desserae, have the help of Seth, Rachel and Jake. We are going to be making lunch. We have salad. We are going to be making an egg salad from scratch with homemade mayonnaise. We are also going to be making just a very simple chicken soup that you can make at home, does that sound good ? Jake: Yeah. Chef Desserae: Okay, so the first thing I have to do is actually get my eggs. These are organic eggs, brown eggs. I like, I choose organic, their taste is a little bit better. And I am going to get my water going. This is a sauce pot and a sauce pot is a great size pot for this. It's just high enough that I can fill it half way up and I can place my eggs in. Very carefully, so they don't break and this is cold water. I am just going to throw those in and then 12 minutes later we will have our boiled eggs. Now we are going to go on to the soup. So you guys are going to help me, okay? Alright, we will cut some vegetables. We have some carrots here, we have some onions and we have some celery, we have thyme and parsley. But first we need the most important ingredient. What can you think of, what kind of soup do you think we are making? Rachel : Chicken soup. Chef Desserae: Chicken, I bet you saw it, didn't you? Look at this. I have a whole chicken. So the first thing I am going to do, I am going to show you how to butcher a chicken. Actually it's quite simple, I will do it for you, so you don't have to it. But you will be surprised as how really simple it is. What I want to do is break this down into smaller pieces so that when I put it in our soup pot right here, it will cook a little bit more quickly rather than just throwing the whole chicken in, I could do that but I am just going to break it down a little bit. You can see here, there are two thighs right here, two legs and this is what is considered the breast if the chicken. So what I am going to do is take off the thighs of the chicken. And see there's a lot of fat on these chickens, isn't there? Turn it up to this side right here, there's a small bone right here that will allow me just to kind of rest my knife on it as I go down. I will hit the thighs and I can pop this out. And I now have the chicken thighs and leg together. Isn't that pretty? Very simple. Now I am going to do the other side, same thing, here we have the thigh, I am just going to break that open. Lift it up again, it makes it a little bit easier for me to get at the bone here. I am going to simply slide my knife down until I hit the hip bone, I can't go any further. Pop it out, right there, you can see the ball and the socket. So I am just going to cut right through that. Then I have two thighs great. Now the breast, this is really easy, there is a part of cartilage right here, feel that, you have to wash your hands afterwards, but feel it. Feel this bone. Do you want to feel it too? Make sure you wash your hands afterwards but -- it's a piece of cartilage, it runs right down the center. So I am just going to use that as my guideline for where I put my knife. I am going to go straight down the center, see that? And then there is that cartilage right there for me. It tells me exactly where to cut. I am going to use just the tip of my knife, long smooth strokes and all I am doing is cutting the breast right off the carpet. And since, we are using this for soup, the bones actually give extra flavor and that is the bone in breast, it has the wing attached right to it but for the soup, let's take that right off. I will use this for stock. Actually this soup is, have you heard of stock before? Rachel : No, not really. Chef Desserae: No? Well, it's kind of like a backbone of a kitchen. You stock for a lot of things, you know, for the base of soups, or for sauces, or for stews. You need that liquid, and we can talk about beef stock, chicken stock. And when you do stocks, you use the bones and mere stuff, which is carrots, onions, and celery. So we are essentially making a stalk but just with a smaller amount of bones in here. We are just using the breast, and the thighs, and we are going to leave the wings. And then I will make a stock out of this later, so we can use this still. So it doesn't necessarily need to be thrown away. So I am going to throw our thighs in here. See how much we have, simply great. I think that's going to be enough. So I am going to save this for later too. Alright, now with this as I said, we can use that for stock. But we all touched chicken, didn't we? So now we have to wash our hands because that's really, really problematic. If you are going to go in and cut vegetables, you want to make sure, you are fully clean. You guys wash up and there is soap right there. And I will use the sanitation bucket, to clean up my area. It's just as important to wash your hands, as it is to wash off your board, because that's where all bacteria is. Nice, Nice, good. Are your hands all clean? Yes, yes.