The Fool Leaves It There: Fabricating and Preparing Poultry

The French have a name for two of the best bites on a chicken: sot-l’y-laisse, “the fool leaves it there.” In English we call them the oysters. They’re a pair of small, round nuggets of dark meat tucked into two little hollows on the bird’s back, right above the thighs. They’re tender, juicy, and richer than anything else on the chicken, and most people have never eaten one. That’s because most people don’t know they exist. They carve the breast, pull off the legs, and toss the carcass in the trash with the two best bites still stuck to it. The cooks who know better have kept quiet about it for a long time. In a lot of kitchens, the oysters never make it to the plate. They’re the cook’s reward, eaten standing at the cutting board by whoever broke down the bird. In Japan, yakitori shops sell them as their own skewer, called soriresu, a name borrowed straight from the French. So that’s how much they’re worth. Leave them behind and French cooks will mock you mercilessly, and honestly, I will too.

The oysters are a good test of everything in this lesson. You can’t hack a chicken apart and find them by accident. You have to know where the joints are, where the bones are, and where your knife needs to go. Getting a chicken ready for the heat takes some practice and some careful prep: breaking it down, boning it, trussing it, brining it, and stuffing it safely when you need to. Every bit of it is very doable, and once your hands learn the bird, you’ll never leave the oysters behind again.

Fabricating Poultry

Fabricating a bird means three things: disjointing it (taking it apart at the joints), boning it (separating the meat from the bone), and cutting it into pieces you can actually cook. All you need is a clean board, a boning knife, and a chef’s knife. Not every bird gets broken down. Lots of bigger birds get roasted whole (like Thanksgiving turkeys!). But every cook needs to know how to take a chicken apart. You can’t really call yourself a cook if you can’t bone out a breast.

Know the Bird Before You Cut It

Good fabrication is mostly anatomy. A chicken comes apart at its joints, and a cook who knows where they are can break down a bird in a couple of minutes and waste almost nothing. Newbies? You can identify them by all the hacking and chopping and sawing and cursing. Learn to do it right so nobody calls you a newb.

Nothing Goes in the Trash

Every part of a broken-down bird has a job. The backbone, neck, and wing tips go into the stockpot. Trim scraps become ground chicken or forcemeat. Extra fat and skin get rendered down into chicken fat, which Jewish cooks call schmaltz, and it’s been making food taste better for centuries. The only things that should actually hit the trash are true waste: blood clots, bruised spots, and stray pinfeathers. Sorting your trim this way is how breaking down your own birds actually saves money (see Fresh Doesn’t Mean What You Think: Buying, Receiving, and Storing Poultry).

Safely Storing and Fabricating Poultry

Raw chicken is the most dangerous thing in your kitchen, so treat your cutting station like a crime scene you have to clean up afterward. Clean and sanitize your board and every knife before you start and again when you finish. Wash your hands with soap and warm water going in and coming out. Don’t pull a whole case of birds out of the cooler and let them sit on the counter while you work through them. Work in batches, and keep everything you’re not cutting in the refrigerator. Store the finished pieces in leak-proof containers at 41°F or lower, on the bottom shelf, below ready-to-eat food, meat, and seafood.

Why Truss?

An untrussed chicken in the oven looks like it’s doing jumping jacks. The legs splay out, the wings flop open, and every part sticking out into the hot air cooks faster than the rest, so the wing tips and drumsticks are drying out while the thick breast is still catching up. Trussing ties the legs and wings tight against the body. A tight, compact bird roasts and browns evenly, holds on to more of its moisture, and is a whole lot easier to carve.

Brining Poultry

Brining is just soaking the bird in salt water, usually with some aromatics thrown in. While it soaks, the meat soaks up extra water and salt, and the salt loosens up (denatures) the proteins so they hang on to that water when the heat hits. You end up with chicken that’s juicier and seasoned all the way through, not just on the surface. It’s the best insurance there is for lean cuts that love to dry out, and you already know which part of the chicken that is.

Wet Brine or Dry Brine?

The brine recipe above is a wet brine, and the most important step isn’t the soak, it’s what happens after. Once the bird comes out of the brine, it goes back in the refrigerator uncovered so the skin can dry out, because wet skin won’t brown or crisp until all that water is gone.

A dry brine skips the bucket entirely. You just salt the bird, about 1 teaspoon of kosher salt per pound for a whole chicken, inside the cavity and under the skin of the breast and legs. Set it on a rack over a sheet pan and leave it in the refrigerator uncovered for 6 to 24 hours. It looks like nothing’s happening, but a lot is. First the salt pulls juice out to the surface. Then the salt dissolves into that juice, and the salty liquid soaks back into the meat, seasoning it and loosening up the proteins so they hold on to more of their own juice in the oven. The whole time, the cold, dry air in the refrigerator is drying out the skin for you.

So which one? A wet brine puts more water into the meat. A dry brine takes up a lot less room in the walk-in and gives you drier skin. Either way, the skin has to be dry before it can crisp, and the reason why is in The Juices Lie: Cooking Poultry, Method by Method.

Stuffing a Bird Safely

Stuffing – or dressing, if your grandmother’s from the deep south- is a mix of bread crumbs, herbs, and other ingredients cooked inside a roasting bird. It tastes great! It cooks slowly, and as the bird gives up its delicious juices, they soak into the stuffing and make it just…. Magical. Stuffing has a problem, though: it’s a perfect little incubator for harmful bacteria.

The center of a bird is the slowest-heating spot there is, and the stuffing is sitting in there soaking up raw chicken juice the whole time. On a large bird, the breast can hit 165°F while the stuffing in the middle is still hanging out in the danger zone. So for anything bigger than a single-serving fella, bake the stuffing in its own pan. Small birds served one per person, like Cornish hens and quail, heat through fast enough to be stuffed safely, but only if you follow the following rules EXACTLY: