Chris A. Alingham: Hey, this is Chris A. Alingham with the Virtual Weber Bullet and welcome to the new and improved how to butterfly a chicken video. This is a typical super market chicken, it's called a broiler, fryer, sometimes it's called a young chicken. It weighs three and a half to four pounds, it's just the perfect size for barbecuing. What I am going to do is I am going to remove the backbone first and then I am going to remove the breast bone, which will allow us to lay this chicken out flat, which is why it's called butterfly and then optionally you can cut the chicken in half, if you like to do that for two separate halves. I am going to start by turning this chicken back side up, and I am going to use the tail of the chicken as a handle, I'll take hold of that with my left hand and then using a pair of ordinary kitchen shears, I am going to cut out one side of the back and then the other side of the back to remove to. Here's how it's done.
Just start cutting down on the right side, through the thin bones along the back, you are not cutting down the center of the back, you are cutting down to the side, cut all the way through. So now I have got one side open, now I am going to go to the other side of the back and cut down that side as well. I am trying to stay as close to the back as I can, and there you have it, here is the back out of the chicken. Now a lot of people would simply just sort of push this open and push the flap, which you can do, and that's fine. What I'd like to do, is to take out the breast bone (the breast bone is also known as the Keel bone) and what you'll inside here, is a little white spot, right here where the breast bone is located and I am going to take a paring knife and cut through this little piece of gristle, and now I am going to pop that Keel bone right out of the chicken, you can see it coming up right here. Hey, just simply twist the two halves back to expose it. Now take your fingers and run along either side of the keel bone, all the way to the end, do this on the left and the right side, you can get your finger up on a thick end to probably loose, and then the whole keel bone would just come right out in a single piece, just like that. There it is. So now with the keel bone removed, there is a just a little bit of clean up we have to do.
Here at the opening of the cavity there is some fatty material that I am going to just trim off with the shears. No one is going to want to eat that (missed a spot). And there is also some sort of tissue here from where I cut the backbone out, I'll try to remove that as best as I can, and I would probably would go ahead and give this a rinse under cold running water in the sink, just to clean this up a little bit, and then I will pat it dry. Now this is basically done at this point, here is your butterfly chicken, you could take the wing tips and tuck them underneath here if you wanted to, keep them from burning . You can cook it just like that, put some rub on it and throw that in a barbecue or you can cut this into half if you want to do that as well. It's very easy now that we have taken out the keel bone, just take your knife and just cut it right down the center here all the way through the meat, and now you have two halves. So that's it, these chicken halves are ready for barbecuing, you can just simply apply a rub and barbecue them straight away, or you could brine them, you can marinate them, try them anyway you like.
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