chicken breasts on chopping board with knife and sharpening steel
Angela Slater
19 June 2018
Daughter of a farmer and market gardener so have always had a connection with the outdoors, whether it was keeping animals or producing fruit, vegetables and cut flowers. Along with my work at Hayes Garden World I also have a smallholding, mainly breeding rare breed pigs. I gained an HND and BSc in Conservation and Environmental Land Management, as a result I am an ardent environmentalist and have a keen interest in environmentally friendly gardening. In my time at Hayes I worked for several years in the Outdoor Plant and Houseplant areas

How to butterfly and make a pocket in chicken breasts

Two easy steps to making chicken even more versatile

A lot of recipes call for butterflied chicken as it cooks quicker and more evenly, also if you are doing a chicken burger is needs to be a reasonably thin piece of meat not a big fat whole breast. A thinner piece of meat cooks quicker and more evenly so perfect for our chicken tikka burger recipe. (Click here to watch the video) Richard shows you the safe ways to both butterfly and make a pocket in your chicken breast, without cutting yourself.

 

 

Also some of our recipes call for stuffed chicken, so Richard shows you how to create a pocket in the breast where you can place the stuffing. Another way to stuff the chicken breast is to butterfly it, lay the filling over half then fold the other half over and secure the edges with cocktail sticks. The disadvantage of this is that quite often the stuffing will bubble out and you will be left with very little filling. If you make a pocket then the aperture is much smaller so you are going to lose less stuffing.

Click here to watch the video where we stuff a chicken breast with mozzarella, sundried tomatoes and spinach.

(A survey by eti, Electronic Temperature Instruments Ltd, has concluded that the suggested cooking times for supermarket whole chickens are widely inaccurate leading to the customer spending an average of £44 too much on energy over the course of a year. This shows the importance of checking the internal temperature of the chicken with a temperature probe. The cooking times are an average of 43 minutes too long leading to the chicken being overcooked by 27C which results in tough dry meat.)