There will be blood - and there will be Thai curry

Medical training comes in handy when you want to bone a chicken

Our man in the kitchen Jack Shamash makes no bones about cutting up a chicken

 

My wife used to be a vegetarian. She tends to be a bit squeamish about all the bones and gore that are associated with cooking meat. By contrast I love it! So let me tell you how I bone chickens - be warned, I won't spare you any of the unpleasant details.

 

Take a fresh oven-ready chicken. Wash it inside and out. And then get ready to hack it into little pieces.

 

I have a great big Chinese cleaver which I use to attack chicken. First of all, I put the chicken on a cutting board and I smash the cleaver through the back. It might take two or three whacks before the bird is divided in two.

 

Then I take a sharp knife. I pull back the legs and cut them away from the body, slicing through the joint that links the thigh to the pelvis.

 

At one time I did basic medical training, part of which involves dissecting dead bodies. We were taught a technique known as ‘blunt disssection', which involved making a cut and sticking your fingers through the dead flesh and pulling the muscle away from the bones, This is a brilliant technique for removing the breasts from the chicken carcase. I gently pull the flesh off the rib cage. And I use a sharp knife to remove any obstinate bits. By this stage there is a clean carcase with very little meat on it.

 

Then, having done this, I pull the skin off the bones. I physically jerk the chicken skin away from the legs and thighs - a bit like taking off a pair of trousers. The skin usually gets stuck at the bottom of the legs, so I chop the end of the legs off with my trusty cleaver.

 

I then remove the bones from the leg and thigh, slitting the leg and thigh in two and pulling out the bones and any cutting out any tendons  that I can see. At this point I am left with a pile of clean, boneless meat.

 

Back to the chicken. The bones and skin goes into a large pot of water, which is brought to the boil and simmered as gently as possible for a couple of hours. This liquid is then put through a sieve and you are left with a lot of bits of old bone to throw out, and some absolutely wonderful fresh chicken stock. The stock will last two or three days in the fridge or can be frozen indefinitely. It can be used in soups, rice dishes - in fact in any recipes where you would normally use a stock cube.

 

The meat goes into one pile and I usually use it for making Thai curry. My wife has a much simpler method of getting meat for Thai curry. She goes to the supermarket and buys the breasts - all neatly cut off the bone. Take your pick. It really doesn't matter: either way you'll have a great curry.

 

Top chefs suggest getting various obscure herbs such as fresh lemon grass and pounding them in a pestle. Forget that. Do what people do in Thailand - buy a big tub of curry paste. I used to buy this in Chinese supermarkets, but now it's widely available in most big supermarkets.

 

You can get green curry paste (a little bit hot), yellow curry paste (slightly hotter) and red curry paste (just a bit hotter than that).

 

Ingredients
About a kilo of boneless, skinless chicken meat
A dessert spoon of curry paste
A large onion
A tin of coconut milk
Some parsley or coriander for garnish

 

Chop up the chicken meat so that it's in chunks about a couple of inches long. Then slice an onion, and pour four or five tablespoons of oil in a wok. When the oil is really hot and starting to burn - you should see the smoke coming off it - throw in the onions. Reduce the heat and cook until the onions are soft.

 

Then add a good dollop of Thai curry paste. Use a dessert spoon to measure the paste. If you put in a really heaped dessert spoon, the curry will be pretty hot. If you use a level spoon of paste, the curry will be pretty mild. I usually settle for somewhere in between.

 

Pour in a tin of coconut milk, mix it in well so that the paste dissolves into the milk, and then add the chicken bits. Simmer for about 20 minutes. Then pick up one of the biggert bits of chicken. If it's cooked through (no pink bits) bring the whole lot to the table and serve it immediately in bowls with plain steamed Basmati rice. There will be lots of lovely juice and it will be warming and fragrant. You can garnish it with coriander or parsley if you want to be a bit posh. And you can serve it with some raw salad vegetables - cucumber, lettuce, onion, pak choi, raw spinach leaves etc

 

Top chefs, eat your heart out!

 

JACK SHAMASH puts meals on the family table every night of the week at his home in north London. He also writes for The Times, The Guardian and Horticulture Week (so he knows a lot about fruit and veg)