How to Cut Up a Whole Chicken to Store

How should you cut a whole chicken and store it in the fridge?  The best instruction I have seen so far is from Walk To Eat because other than photos, the blogger had also shared a video of the process.  However, before I proceed, I will do what my mother taught me to do and that is to give the whole chicken a good rub down with coarse salt first before I wash it off.  The salt can kill some bateria, so it will remove any smell there is on your chicken.

If you follow through with his instructions, this is how your chicken will be parted.  I have drawn red lines on the parts to show how I would cut them up into smaller portions for my soup or dishes.  

I will cut each drumstick and wings into three sections and the carcass into two sections.  These are parts from the chicken that I will pack together in a container for boiling soup with:

1) chicken feet
2) the bony parts of the chicken, like the stumps and wingtips

3) the joints from the drumsticks 
4) the carcass

By storing them together, it will be easier to take them out from the freezer when it is time for me to boil my soup.  You can see from his video for making Basic Chicken Soup that the blogger used a whole chicken to make it.  This was exactly how I used to boil soup which is wasteful for a small family if you do not eat the chicken meat.

You can learn how I make my ABC soup which is rather similar to what he is making, except that I prefer to use pork soup bones to flavour my soup.  

The reason why I steam the frozen pork over the soup is to:

-save time on thawing it.
-get rid of the scum.

The Chinese traditional way to get rid of the scum is to pour hot water over the soup bone.  However, I discovered that once it is boiling in the soup, more scums will appear which I will have to remove. 

This is how I would like my pork soup bone to look like when it is ready to be added to the soup to continue boiling.

Marinating the soup bone with salt before boiling it in the soup makes it tasty.  So, the meat on it will more likely be eaten than discarded.  You can read about the additional ingredients I used in making this soup to change its flavour or use it as a soup stock to cook other dishes at the following link:

Do you like soup? If so, what is your favorite soup?

This is another way to cut your chicken if you want to debone it.