Hi, I’m Tom Papoutsis. I have been a Firehouse Chef for a lot of years and today, I’m going to be passing on to you some tips on what we can do with chicken. So today, we’re going to be working with chicken basics. Essentially, what we’re going to be doing we’re going to start out by cutting a chicken up. We’re going to take a whole chicken, we’re going to cut the chicken up, then we’re going to basically work on what we can do with the chicken. Marinades, rubs, how to bake the chicken, how to fry the chicken, today we’re going to be using just regular household kitchen tools. Cutting board, knife as far as the marinades, rubs and what not, we’re going to be using regular spices, oils, some vinegars and stuff that we’re going to do with that. We will go through that when we get to each individual portion as to what we’re going to do with this chicken. Let's talk about safety first.
When you’re handling chicken, chicken can of course, any meat that we handle has bacteria. We certainly want to make sure we wash it, just rinse it off real good to get started and then anything that we use our knife, our cutting board, we want to make sure that we don't cross-contaminate. Part of what I’m using the gloves for today, these gloves are just regular, these are actually a non-latex type of gloves that you see EMS people wear.
The gloves help as far as handling the chicken, once you are handling it everything stays on the gloves, you peel the gloves off, you throw them away and then you go on to the next thing that you are doing. So before we begin, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I have been in the Fire Department for 25 years, I have been cooking in a firehouse for about 20 years of that and in the firehouse cooking meals in a firehouse were on shoe string budget. So we have to be able to get as much as we can for our money that is why we will take a whole chicken that we get on sale and we’re going to cut this thing up and this is what I’m going to show you.
You can take this thing and cut it into the different pieces and not pay somebody else to cut it up in order to prepare it. So with that, let's get started with chicken basics.