Selecting the Best Knife for Butchering Chickens

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Butchering chickens at home allows you to control the quality and freshness of your meat. It’s a simple process that can be done discreetly in a suburban neighborhood. The right tools make a big difference to ensure an efficient and humane process. While the right knife comes down to personal preference, consider these features when choosing the best knife for butchering chickens. 

A Sharp Edge

Sharp knives are essential to ensure precise cuts. Depending on the particular task, our choice of knife varies. When it comes to dispatching chickens, a high-quality knife that holds a sharp edge is necessary to dispatch a live bird humanely. The blade will be subject to dulling on the feathers and quills of the chicken’s neck. Keep a honing blade close by to touch up your knives.  Honing blades are simple to use and easy to clean after butchering is complete. 

Be mindful of your blade. While it’s inevitable your sharp knives will come into contact with bone during the butchering process, most tasks are completed by cutting the connective tissue between the bones rather than the bones themselves. The most challenging areas are cutting the neck and removing the feet or wings. While the bones in the neck interlock more, the legs and the wings are separated by cutting the tissue in the joints. If you find yourself trying to cut the bones, you haven’t located the joint. Simply bend the joint, and feel for the knuckles inside. Cut between the knuckles. Flexible blades help in this process, as they can be guided more easily between the bones versus a stiff blade. 

Furthermore, be mindful of the blade on the cutting surface. I’ll admit, that my husband is constantly getting on to me about dragging my knife blade across the cutting board. Learn to use the flat part of the blade (the part that is not sharpened) if you use the knife to push something across hard surfaces.

Remember, select a sharp knife and keep it sharpened. Many cutting accidents happen with a dull knife! 

Comfortable Grip

Depending on how many chickens you need to process, chicken butchering may take a few hours to a few days! A secure grip that is comfortable in your hand the entire process makes a big difference! Knife handles come in different styles and shapes. Some are more curved, while others are straight. A well-balanced knife allows the home butcher more precise control.  Some knives have a soft grip plastic handle and others come with wooden handles, composite or metal handles. Your choice of handles is your preference.  Chefs have long preferred wooden handles, while metal is easier to clean and sanitize. We use a mixture of all of them. 

Knife Quality

Full tang knives are considered the most durable and safest knives. Made with a single piece of steel, they hold up better to tough tasks and hours of use. Full tang knives don’t break like partial tang knives, as the steel extends the full length of the handle. As a young cook, I remember being told that full-tang knives were a good indicator of high quality knives. Partial tang knives are an easy way for producers to save production costs and likely will ensure repeat customers who wear out or break their knives. 

Our Favorite High-Quality Knives

While you could use a single knife for home processing, each knife has a different purpose in the home butcher’s tool kit. 

Dispatching Knife

Philip likes using the Huusk Boning Knife for poultry dispatch This knife has a hole in the base of the blade that allows you to slip your index finger through the blade, ensuring a steady grip and good control. This hole also makes a convenient way to hang your knife close to the kill cone so it’s always close by. The curved blade of the Huusk knife is a durable, thick blade that makes dispatch easy work.

Evisceration Knife

For evisceration, we like a fish fillet knife. Fillet knives have a flexible blade and a sharp point. The blade of a fillet knife is thin and easy to manipulate especially when removing the neck.  The sharp point allows you to puncture the skin into the body cavity to remove the internal organs. Always be mindful as you pierce the skin being careful not to puncture the organs. While fillet knives come in a variety of sizes, a 5″ to 7″ knife is perfect. 

Note About Kitchen Shears

While kitchen shears are easy to use when butchering chickens, we prefer not to use them. When cutting things like the neck with kitchen shears you can create bone spurs that remain in your meat. The only task I use kitchen shears is to remove the spur from the wings. I usually do this when cooking rather than during processing.

To Piece or Not on Processing Day

Piecing your chickens on processing day is a very personal choice. It comes down to a few factors: time and freezer space.  Breaking down and packaging chickens into cuts of meat will greatly increase your processing time. Even with years of experience, Philip and I process about 5 to 6 birds an hour when we leave the birds whole.

One of the biggest benefits of breaking the chickens down is they will take up considerably less freezer space. Here at Kowalski Mountain, we choose to leave our chickens whole. The main reason is it forces us to use the whole chicken every time rather than using only our favorite cuts. My favorite cut is the chicken breast. If I pieced them out, I would be inclined to use mostly chicken breasts, leaving us with only thighs and legs until we process chickens again. Historically we have butchered our own poultry every two years, which is a long time to run out of my favorite cut! 

Our Preference for Freezing

While we prefer to freeze our chicken as whole birds, we make one exception. I like to remove the wings because I think it makes better use of the meat.  We love to sit down to a meal of wings, but if I cook a whole chicken the wing is never the first choice. The best way to remove the wings during processing is a good paring knife. If you want to keep things simple and use a single knife, a fillet knife will do the job well, but a paring knife has a short blade to waste less of the shoulder as you cut around the joint and between the bones. This is a challenging cut for me, it takes practice.  The more you do, the better you will get at making a clean cut close to the joint. The Gerber Gear Field dress kit has a great paring knife that holds up well and is easy to use.

Breaking Down a Whole Chicken

When breaking whole chickens down in the kitchen I typically use a good boning knife. It’s a good choice in kitchen knives to cut close to the breast bone and between the necessary joints to piece the chicken down to the traditional 8 pieces. While a boning knife is less flexible than a filet knife, it allows me to piece the entire chicken using a single knife.

The Best Knife for Butchering Chickens

When choosing poultry knives, or any knives used in butchering, consider the sharpness of the blade, the comfort of the grip, and the finesse needed in the task. These three factors will help you choose a qaulity knife that gets the job done humanely and efficiently.

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