How To Tie A Chicken For Roasting

Welcome to the butcher of Kingsville .

Today , we are going to be learning how to take your chicken and tying it up and preparing it for an oven roast .

The reason we're doing this is to make sure those breasts are plumped up nice and exposed so that they will cook .

It's the thickest piece of meat on the animal .

So we want to make sure that that's going to cook all the way through .

If you just put your bird in like this , it would still cook , of course , but it wouldn't cook as evenly .

So we're just gonna go and tie it up to make sure that it cooks nice and evenly .

First thing I'm going to do is remove the neck .

So now when you're going to be cutting through a chicken neck , you have to remember you're cutting through a bone , so you have to use some level of force .

But , you know , don't be afraid to put a little bit of force behind it .

Also , as you know , a lot of meat wants to separate naturally , just a little bit of a cut and then a pull sometimes is all it takes , the neck is fantastic .

If you want to reserve that and keep it for , um , stocks , you can make stock , you could make , uh , chicken soup with it .

You can even give it to your dog as a treat .

Um , uncooked .

Of course .

Now to tie up the , the chicken , the whole chicken we're going to get , let it relax a little bit .

So we're going to take its legs , hold it nice and firm and kind of push it into its body here , that's going to make sure it again , pushes those breasts up .

Now , these little guys here , the wingtips are going to have a tendency to burn .

So if they're left out like this , they're just going to block in and burn .

What we like to do then is instead take those wingtips and push with your thumbs , push it right underneath the breast and they'll actually stay nice in place like that .

And then we've got uh for the most part , a relatively consistent and evenly shaped bid and I'm going to take our string , which I've precut what it is about the length of my wingspan and my wingspan is a little bit longer than most .

So I've cut it a little bit shorter , but that's about as long as you're looking for .

Put it right in the middle underneath the breast right here , doesn't really matter because you'll be surprised how well it holds on to it .

It doesn't matter exactly where it comes .

So right underneath there through the wings over top of the legs , wrap it underneath the drumsticks here .

And now it's actually just a very simple knot .

It doesn't have to be fancy , nice and tight because we do want to make sure that those breasts are nice and plucked up .

Just another regular knot to close it .

Get rid of the excess .

Now , the very final thing we can do is take the tip of the breasts here , which are , now they've been kind of covered up and we'll put these legs underneath to just expose that .

So what I'm going to do here is just kind of in the cavity , put my fingers with my thumbs , I'm just going to kind of do this kind of motion and make sure that that breast comes up nice and that would be an oven ready .

Um , chicken .