Hi my name is Dave Meli I’m from The Healthy Butcher here in Toronto. I’m here to talk to you about poultry. Where do we get started, we’ll let’s start it off with some simple, some simple things here on how to prepare a chickens for a barbecue.

The first thing we know when we start off with this removing the neck. What I would do here is begin by taking off this excess skin. So wall I’ve done is just cut around the neck and on the bottom here, I’m just going to remove this extra fat along the bottom. So to remove the neck, what I’ll do I’ll just take my knife and cut down until my knife reaches the bone. Until my knife reaches the bone, I’ll pull off, what will happen is by pressing down we’ll separate the vertebrae and it will give me space to simply go the rest of the way through the neck.

This neck is beautiful for making sauce with, this makes an excellent soup and the meat in here after you’ve braised it beautiful to eat if you don’t mind working through some of the bones. So to get this chicken ready for it if you were to put some of the barbecue coal, let’s say if you wanted to put it on a rotisserie I would probably trust this chicken.

So the first I know I will do is I’ll take my wings and I’m going to fold them back. It allows the chicken just to sit upright and this will make in the end helpless uniform to shape of the chicken. There are many, many different ways to truss a chicken or any form of poultry.

Were to start off with you’re truss, I’m going to take my butchers vine and I’m going to tie a knot, then what were going to do is I’m going to take my butcher string wrap it around the outside of this chicken legs. And starting off with a knot on top of it, I’m going to position my legs so that they crisscross on top of each other. What will happened now is I tighten this knot, is it I’ll tightened this knot is it will tightened this legs together and I’ll bring it closer to the bottom.

And then I’ll take my strings and there were two, two little crevices here in between the legs and the breast now I’m going to run the string right in between those legs. And then I will turn my bird around. And tie a knot on either side of the wings so that my knot meets right where the neck used to be. What’s lovely about particular trussing method is first of all it is very simple and second it keeps your chicken as nice and tight as possible.

If I were to be putting this on the rotisserie now you could tell my steal runs through the back of the bird and right up through where the neck is and it keeps my chicken in a nice tight package.