Buy a Whole Chicken
Chicken is one of the most popular types of meat in the Netherlands. Most people love fillets, but do you ever buy a whole chicken? Maybe it’s professional insanity at work in the newsroom, but we’re fans and believe we have good reasons for it. So here’s a plea for buying whole chicken.
Delicious and affordable
It may seem like a hit to your wallet, but buying a whole chicken is often considerably cheaper than buying individual pieces. It contains no fewer than two skin-on breast fillets, two legs, two thighs, two wings and a carcass that you can use to make the most delicious dishes. Simply freeze anything you don’t want to use right away and you can eat from it for days. Nervous about putting the knife into a whole chicken? Chef Gordon Ramsay shows you in this video how to easily fillet a chicken.
Crispy chicken skin
There’s nothing better than deliciously crispy chicken skin, but in the shop it often proves surprisingly difficult to find breast meat with the skin on. When you buy a whole chicken, you can quickly cut beautiful, substantial fillets from it that you can fry until crispy on their precious, flavour-packed skin. Delicious with a pinch of salt, garlic and rosemary or thyme.
BBQ chicken wings and drumsticks
You can also easily remove the legs, thighs and wings from the carcass with a little twisting and chopping. Mix some ketchup with a splash of soy sauce, grated ginger, brown sugar and lemon in a bowl, and marinate these little gems until they become deliciously sticky chicken wings, drumsticks and thighs. Cook them straight away in the oven on the grill setting, put them on the barbecue when the weather is nice, or keep them marinated in the freezer.
Stock without stock cubes
Once you’ve cut off the breast, legs, thighs and wings, you’re left with a chicken carcass. Depending on your knife skills, a little more or less chicken meat will remain on it, but that doesn’t matter at all. Put the whole lot in a pan with plenty of water, a generous pinch of salt and some coarsely chopped vegetables (for example: carrot, onion, celery) and bring it to the boil. Lower the heat, cover the pan and let it simmer for at least an hour. Pour everything through a fine sieve and what remains is the most delicious, golden chicken stock. You can serve it as it is, but you can also use it as a base in lots of soups, sauces and stews.
Kick-ass chicken soup
Are you really committed to the job? Let the leftovers in the sieve cool for a moment, pick the last pieces of chicken from the carcass and add them to the stock. They’ll be the little treats in your homemade chicken soup. Add some finely chopped vegetables and herbs (these can be the same vegetables as for the stock, but chopped a little more finely), and bring it back to the boil for about 10 minutes, until the vegetables are tender but still have a bite.
You can recognise homemade chicken soup by the glistening pearls floating on the surface. These little flavour bombs come from the bones and the fat. This is chicken soup just like your grandmother used to make.
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