Andrew Zimmern's Chicken Shears Hack Was Made For Thanksgiving

There's a lot of prep work that goes into making sure Thanksgiving goes off without a hitch. You have to plan out the perfect menu, including which turkey recipe you want to use and which pies should be offered for dessert. You have to send out invites, go grocery shopping, and figure out how much wine you should buy. But there are some last-minute things you have to do on Thanksgiving day that you really can't prepare for, and chef Andrew Zimmern just dropped a kitchen-shears hack that could take some of the stress out of those last few moments before the big meal.

One of those things you can't really do ahead is making graving using pan drippings from your turkey, but the other task might be even more daunting: You have to carve the turkey correctly. There's a lot of pressure when you take a perfectly bronzed roasted turkey out of the oven, knowing that one wrong hack of your knife could turn the whole thing into a messy jumble of (hopefully) juicy meat and crispy skin that tastes great but looks like dog food. What if there was an easier way? We've been using a regular old carving knife on our Thanksgiving turkey for years, but Andrew Zimmern's kitchen shears hack makes us think it's time to try something new.

You may have used kitchen shears to spatchcock a chicken or turkey, but Andrew Zimmern uses his kitchen shears on cooked poultry. He uses them to precisely carve his bird, as opposed to using a knife or another carving implement. "It's an awesome life skill," Zimmern said in a TikTok video demonstrating his technique. He shows how to use kitchen shears to carve a chicken, but you can use the same principles to carve your Thanksgiving turkey, too.

Here's how he does it. Once the bird has rested after cooking in the oven, Zimmern makes a cut where the thighs and leg are attached to the breast. Then he cuts right into the joint that connects the leg and thigh, removing the leg. He cuts the wings off, then makes a cut along the entire length of the breast on one side of the breast bone. He then uses a smaller knife to help carve the breast meat away from the bone and repeats on the other side. After removing smaller bits of meat from the chicken, he then breaks the thighs off of the bird and removes the bone from each thigh. The result is a picture-perfect platter of meat. Thanks to the precision of the kitchen shears, everyone will get a neatly carved piece of dark meat or a perfect slice of white meat on their plate.