Meyer Moment: Poultry Cut List

Hey everyone! Welcome back to The Coop with Meyer Hatchery - where we talk all things poultry in hopes of inspiring crazy chicken keepers and educating future flock owners. We’re glad to have you tuning in for this brief midweek as we provide a Meyer Moment to cover relevant happenings. 

Let’s take a Meyer Moment to talk about poultry cut lists. When processing your own birds it should always start with a butchering plan. A cut list will help you track, record, and package your poultry according to how you plan to use it. For instance, do you like to keep the leg and thigh together? Have you considered making a batch of chicken sausage? Today we’re quite literally helping you break down the butchering process. 

Walking down the grocery store aisle, it’s easy to grab a pack of tenderloins for chicken salad wraps or drumsticks for your next barbeque - so why should going to your freezer be any different? 

Typically you don’t think about how you consume a whole chicken until butchering day, but with a little planning, it can help ease stress and your cooking time. I can already feel the look in your eyes, but Kendra how am I supposed to know how much we consume?

When you first process chickens, it can be hard to know just how many whole birds you’d like to keep versus those you piece out. It’s ok, as with most things you’ll adapt and discover your preferences over time. To make it easy consider diversifying so you can experiment with several different cuts. Use a poultry cut list to record what you end up with, so you can reference it next time and make changes accordingly.

As an example, for my family, I try to package my breasts and thighs in packages of 6. That ensures everyone is fed with leftovers for lunch. However, if you’re a family of two, you may only want 2 breasts per package, or 4. Have a larger family, increase that number. 

Also, do you prefer bone-in or bone-out? Personally, I prefer boneless breasts with the skin on and bone-in thighs with the skin on. Are you not a fan of chicken wings? Save them separately for stock. (but seriously, is anyone doing that). I like to package my wings in large batches of 24 or more for you guessed it! Superbowl parties and cookouts.

There’s still plenty to use for broth! The necks and feet along with excess bones and skin can be saved and bagged for stock making.

And let’s be honest, when it comes to whole birds vs pieced, I start with piercing out my poultry. The beginning of the day is when I’m most motivated because butchering can be an event, and usually, towards the end, I’m tired, which makes it easy to opt for my last birds to stay whole. For whole birds, they’re perfect in the instapot when I need shredded chicken, saving the larger birds to be roasted whole, or smoked. 

Thinking through your cooking preferences and eating habits will help guide your butchering process. To help, we’ve created a poultry cut list with a processing overview and packaging specifications which can be found below in the show notes. 

We hope you enjoyed this Meyer Moment and get planning your poultry cut list for processing day! 

Enjoy the rest of your week and as always, thank you for listening to The Coop!