Chicken: There's a Lot of Weird Here

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Last year it occurred to me that I needed to deal with the cultural and emotional baggage I have about certain kinds of offal. And that I needed to better explore the ones I didn’t have baggage to work through, of course. I focused my studies on offal specifically because it’s usually cheaper than traditional cuts, and I wanted to make sure I knew how to make these parts delicious for the days my frugal heart couldn’t bear to pay whatever the normal stuff cost at a given time. I encourage those of you who also have cultural and emotional baggage about offal to try to work through some of that. The easiest way to work through it is to bring it home and put it in the freezer. It’s there, and you know you’re going to have to eat it, so it can hang out while you deal with yourself and are ready to cook it! Originally, I planned to do this with poultry in general, but research indicates chicken can mostly be swapped out pretty easily for other birds you may have. I’ll briefly cover the more commonly eaten parts, too, so don’t worry! But mainly, it’s gonna be the less savory stuff, as it were.

I just really like the look on its face! Jason Leung/Getty

The Whole Bird

In general, I consider whole birds the most economical. You get all the different cuts, a bit of offal, and you generally can get 3-5 meals from one. There are also a lot of ways to cook them!

In the vast majority of chickens, you’ll need to check the cavity and pull out the package(s) of offal. Generally there will be neck, gizzard, heart, liver, and kidney (sometimes no kidney). Sometimes not all of those, but most of the time yes in my experience. I forgot to pull this out once, before roasting a chicken, and the smell was awful. It wasn’t the best tasting chicken I’ve ever baked, either. If it says it comes with all the gibblets and you think that pouch isn’t in there, dig deeper. That’s also happened to me where it was crammed into the recesses of the cavity.

For whole birds, you can roast them in various different ways, boil or simmer whole for soups, spatch-cock, do beer can chicken, crockpot or Instant Pot a whole bird, braise, milk chicken, make pot roast mole (tutorial on the different kinds of Oaxacan mole sauces is here), rotissary, bundt pan chicken (I did not know about this before, and it’s ingenious!), or cut up into pieces for other recipes. Here’s a tutorial for cutting up chickens!

Under normal circumstances, I would make at least a half-hearted attempt to provide substantive content before skipping right down to the next video, but today is not that day. Because this next video deals with a whole chicken and is pure, blissful magic. Just magic. One of my bffs sent this to me, and I need this in my life yesterday!

If we’re being fair, my intention already was to gloss right on over the cut parts, because people who are buying specific pieces typically know what to do with what they bought, but I don’t want to ignore it entirely. Those of you who know how to make things with your meats still want new stuff to try, too! Here’s a link each for ways to make breasts (lies; you get two for breast because piccata is my very favorite chicken anything), tenders, quarters, wings, thighs, and drumsticks that perhaps you’ll not have previously considered! It is also my view that everyone should check this out. Vanilla chicken!!

Now, onto the magic. Farah, you are an angel for sending this video. Without the combat part of angel-dom, of course.

The Weirdest Stuff, Head to Toe

I’m a firm believer in telling people what they least want to hear first, because it makes what comes next all the better. So here’s the weirdest stuff.

Cockscomb

Evidently, rooster combs are preferred because larger. This makes sense to me. I have personally never seen the comb at the store, but maybe y’all have? It is, “they” say, highly gelatinous. You could probably do something similar to calves foot jelly, if you’re not looking for a cockscomb-specific recipe, or could incorporate it when making bone broths. That said, it turns out that there is a lot to do with these bits, many of which look pretty appealing to me enough that my research process has worked me through the cockscomb baggage I didn’t even know I had. Chefs I’ve read on this describe the combs as melt-in-your-mouth delicious, and in some cases, liken it to a soft chicken dumpling. I don’t eat dumplings, so I’ll assume y’all know better than I do what that means. Cleaning and prepping for your meal evidently is much like working with beef’s tongue, where you braise, peel, then do stuff. Not a joyous set of tasks, but not particularly challenging either.

Things to make with the combs include Cibreo, a very strange, Renaissance-era Italian sauce that also include a thing I didn’t previously know about called “unlaid eggs.” This guy makes cibreo sound amazing, though. Here’s a different version; it seems this dish varies based on what bits you’ve got laying about. Most of the pictures I saw showed it served on bread, so it seems like it could stand in for biscuits and gravy as a breakfast meal. I also noticed that many recipes added testicles and/or took out the combs, so it seems you can float this pretty easily across the offal since the goal is a super rich but seemingly thin sauce of yums rather than married to specific organs.

La finanziera is a stew indigenous to the Piedmont area of Italy. It’s got the full shebang of offal in there, but I totally want to try this. That .PDF also has another recipe for a cockscomb pie. You could turn them into lardons, or even make ockscomb dessert! This is a super expensive gnocchi dish, on account of the truffles, but woah I want to eat that. There’s also risotto as an option,

Not meat, but here is a recipe for celosia, which gardeners often call cockscomb. I’m going to end the cockscomb section now, because I’ve become interested enough that this could become its own post.

Turns out you really can learn anything from YouTube!

Testicles

Although I’ve not eaten rooster testicles, I’ve eaten the testicles of several mammals. I like them enough that typically, if I see testes on a menu, I stop reading the menu at that point. Nothin’ else to see there, when testes are an option! As such, I really do think you should try these if they’re available. Mammal testicles are strongly reminiscent of chicken nugget (so rooster ones must be more so, yeah?), and I personally find that I like them best with a plum-based dipping sauce. That’s weird to me, as I normally am really anti sweet-with-meat. So it goes.

Apparently there are many festivals for turkey testicles. I had no idea!

In general, you will need to at least scald your testicles before peeling them, but do ensure you peel them. Most common preparation for testes is to fry them, but you can also sautée, roast, boil, or stew them. According to Chef Becky Selengut, you should poke a hole in testicles before frying, lest they otherwise explode. Great tip! In case you didn’t know, there is also a cookbook dedicated to testes!

Things to do with rooster testicles include serving them in a broth with mushrooms and veggies, Hungarian kakashere pörkölt (although the recipe doesn’t include it, the picture indicates that at least some versions of this include combs), tacos (these are made with sheep balls, but you can sub in chicken), a sort of simmered testicle dish called pottaggietto (I couldn’t find a recipe, but did find a method), sliced and breaded before frying (you do this just like you fry any other part of the chicken, though for a shorter length of time), Kashmiri kapooray (normally made with goat) and this beautiful Taiwanese stir fried testicle noodle dish below. It doesn’t come with directions, but it looks like a fairly simple stir fry of cleaned then poached testicles, noodles, lots of green onions, some chiles, and maybe another veg. Whenever I find some testes, I am going to make this first.

Feet

Turns out I’m not going to work through my baggage on this particular part through this post. This basically holds true for me, it seems, for all animals with feet. Either way, though, these are supposed to be really good, and are increasing in popularity in the States as well as other localities where feet are not traditional fare. The Spruce gives us an awesome tutorial on processing chicken feet, plus a recipe! It’s a whole lot of scald and peel, per the others, except with nails to remove! Chicken feet apparently are a popular dim sum option, because recipes really do abound for it! You can also deep fry or make stock and bone broth from them, which of course looks slightly more palatable to me. As per most foods, there’s also a salad for feet!

Lungs

Poultry lungs, as I understand it, should be given to pets. Maybe. I’ve seen and heard people who I personally think eat some pretty nope nope foods say they’d really rather not if possible, too. Other animals’ lungs are more commonly eaten, so this appears to be a poultry thing. That said, I somehow did not come up empty handed. By which I mean I found 1 kind of. It’s bopis na manok, but the author says that lungs weren’t used in this version due to lack of availability.

Intestines

Yep, those too. How you clean them is to:

Clean the intestines again by gently squeezing it with fingers to remove some remaining waste. Pass a running water through the intestine by using a small water hose. Or to be sure open the intestines with scissors and clean it with running water.

Some people also use wire hangers to assist in the cleaning process.

In the Philippines, a dish called isaw is popular, where you marinate and then fry the intestines. There is also a grilled version. In some South Africa, curry malana is popular, where you simmer the intestines and then fry them. Although I am happy to eat sausages with natural casings, aesthetically I have more baggage to work on with intestines that aren’t hidden by the meats they’re stuffed with.

This video makes intestines look tasty. Not gonna lie. I think I would like these cut up the first time I try intestines, because although they definitely look like pasta during a lot of this video (also like funnel cakes and sometimes like onion rings), my knowledge that it isn’t pasta is causing me emotional problems. Also? Is the song used in this video the most popular one on YouTube? Because I have heard it in thousands of videos that Child Tester watches or watched, and here it is again in a food video!

The Usual Fare

In this category, we’re looking at hearts, livers, gizzard (we’ll quickly touch on the proventriculus as well), kidneys, tails, and necks. This is definitely all stuff y’all’ve seen before if you mess with chicken, though you may not have eaten all of them.

These are turkey, but you get the point. Note that it’s common to leave out the kidneys. Left clockwise: neck, gizzard, heart, liver.

Gizzard

This is basically the top of the stomach, and it takes the place of teeth by grinding foods down. If you eat these, please remove the gravel pouch (if it’s still there), and know that these benefit from a longer cook time at lower heat.

Although basically all sources state that this is the least popular part of the giblets, there sure are a lot of recipes for them! Things to do with gizzards include Nigerian stir fried Gizdodo, Southern-style deep frying, sauté, classic gizzard-and-onions, peppered gizzard (high on my list, though I’ll pick a milder chile so Child Tester can eat it, too), curry, Portuguese Moela stew, baked, and this cold dish that reads to me as a salad.

I also found a recipe for proben, which is a Filipino street food. Proben is fried proventriculus, which is the little organ just above the gizzard. I read a lot of recipes for these that used gizzards, too, so although I don’t think they’re exactly interchangeable, you may have some latitude there based on availability of a given organ.

This will explain things more easily.

It was very hard for me to pick just one video. There were a lot, from a lot of different places, that I wanted to try. This one, however, I could feel calling to me rather loudly. Note that if you hand grind your spices, do it before you start cooking. I hand grind all of my spices, and it takes a long time. A really long time. Especially coriander seed.

Hearts

I really like hearts. Ross is skeeved out by them, which is weird because he is good with pig tails (not so good with that on my end). Hearts to me are for fast cooking, and I liked them pan fried and grilled the best. You do have to clean them, and although there are tons of labor intensive ways to do it, I generally agree with Chef Tatu below about simply cutting off the valve area and calling it a day.

Lots and lots of cultures have ways of making hearts, though you obviously have to save them up in the freezer if you aren’t buying a package of them or processing lots of chickens. There is Japanese yakitori (hatsu), chicken hearts with onions and mushrooms, Indonesian pan-fried, Mexican and Brazilian grilled, plus grilled with parsley vinaigrette, hearts with scrambled eggs, confit, currywurst, beer braised hearts (with gizzard, even!), paprikash (with liver!), sautéed with carrots and apple, stir fried, and even more besides!

Livers

So, those of you who object to liver based on its toughness should give chicken liver a try. It’s much, much more tender than mammal liver. It also cooks faster. I personally like liver, but only under certain conditions. I need it to either be soaked overnight in milk or washed with vinegar before it’s cooked so the bile funk is gone. If you can do that, liver is wonderful. I do like classic liver and onions (hold the gravy), but I’ve also had some amazing casseroles my father made with liver.

Although many people like to make a mousse or similar with livers (none for me, please), stew, it turns out, is very popular! Also, liver stroganoff is a thing. I did not know that, but it makes sense. And you can, of course, deep fry them!

I see now that I have not been eating enough liver, and intend to change that. Here’s a recipe for Southern fried chicken livers with onions and bell peppers. It looks really good. Also very frugal.

For those of you who’ve never cleaned hearts and livers, this is an excellent tutorial that shows you the right (not lazy, as I can be at times) way to perform this task.

Kidneys

Kidneys get left out of the little giblets packages a lot, so if you want to eat these you will most likely need to look in the offal section of your grocer or ask the butcher directly for kidneys. I just pan fry them with salt and pepper, along with the rest of the pouch, if I don’t need the organs for anything other than a treat. I’ve yet to seek kidneys out deliberately, though I’m reconsidering this now. You also, ideally, should let your kidneys soak for around 20-30 minutes in milk, per liver.

In Britain, they have a devilled kidney dish that normally uses lamb, but some people use chicken instead. As long as you’ve got the same weight as a recipe for another animal calls for, you’re good. You can also boil your kidneys. But before we get too into all that, let’s make sure we first know how to prepare them! So you know, a number of the recipes I link will call for other kidneys. It’s extraordinarily difficult to locate chicken kidney recipes in the sea of kidney-friendly chicken recipes. Just swap out by weight; no bigs.

Now that we know what to do, y’all need to see this one! Mostly because I need to save this video so I can make this when I’ve got time.

Other things to do with kidneys include takka tak gurda masala, fried (spicy or not), braised in tomato sauce, sautéed, warm salad of kidney goodness that just went to the top of my meals-to-try list, pan fried, with a butter-mustard and parsley sauce, and pie. I think for the pie, I’d use chicken thighs. I am starving now.

Before we leave off of kidneys, I want to give y’all one more “what to do with this thing” video. It deals with pig kidneys, and you do not want to watch this if graphic animal stuff is upsetting to you. Do not. But if you’re good with seeing more of the butchering process (mostly in the beginning of the video), this may be interesting.

Necks

I’ve only ever used necks for stock, though I imagine they’d be nice for pots of beans, too. I made pigs’ tails the other day, and while none of us liked them, we saved the leftovers for baked beans. This is, as you’d expect, a body part with relatively little meat compared to bones. Necks to me are for stock, though. But not to everyone!

People do lots with necks! You can fry them, cook them with gizzards, make an omelet, braise, cook adobo style, cook in tomato gravy, stuff them (did not expect this!), geera chicken necks, bake them, make soup, do curry, and of course make stew.

I selected this video because it made me feel strongly that I was watching a Dean Winchester cooking show, if he were both real and a YouTuber. I really need to stop watching so much TV.

Tails, AKA Pope’s Nose

Some people also call it the Parson’s Nose. I had to look this up, and honestly am surprised I somehow missed this info. That said, stoked to have it now! If you grew up calling the tail of the bird someone’s nose, this is why:

The derogatory expression "pope's nose" appears to have been coined in Britain as a result of anti-Catholic feeling after the reign of James II (1685-88). It was well in place by 1796, when Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defined it as "the rump of a turkey." The expression "parson's nose" appears to have arisen as a response, wry or otherwise, directed at the Protestant clergy. Other variations over the centuries have included bishop's nose and recorder's nose (after a form of British judge). It's enough to put more than a few noses out of joint.

In my house, the tail goes to the person most in favor that day. Because it’s the best evar. It’s all fatty delicousness in the tail! Fatty goodness or no, though, these are high in iron and calcium, particularly when compared to the more popular breast. How we generally eat these is roasted, because they’re attached to the whole chicken. I’ve never seen a package of tails at the store or butcher, but the day I do…

People also commonly pan fry them per any recipe above (I recommend butter, salt, and pepper), make bonjiri (yakitori), Filipino BBQ, sous vide (Sarah will want to know this), and of course braise.

We can’t leave off our exploration of head-to-tail chickens without a deep fried tail recipe, so there’s one in the video below. I hope y’all get the chance to explore more of the chicken’s goodness than you normally do!