decision depends on whether money or time is more valuable to you. If you don't bone it,

someone else does, and the extra cost of deboned meat is to cover the extra labor.

An experienced worker in a meat packing house can skin, cut up, trim and debone a

whole chicken in 2 minutes. To debone a breast or thigh takes only 10 seconds. Even a

professional chef cannot come close to that speed. It takes most of us 10 to 15 minutes to cut a

whole chicken into standard serving pieces and cut out the backbone and neck. To properly

debone a breast or thigh takes 2 to 3 minutes each.

Boneless skinless breast meat costs about 25 percent more than bone-in breast (cost of

edible portion only). Boneless thigh costs 40 percent more than bone-in. For many cooks, the

saving of time in the kitchen is worth the added cost. An added benefit of boning it yourself, of

course, is having that nice collection of bones and skins available for making a chicken stock.

The table below lists conversion factors to determine the actual cost of trimmed and

deboned meat, starting with bone-in untrimmed chicken. (This was modified from a U.S.

Department of Agriculture Handbook.)

To arrive at true cost per pound (or 100 g) of boneless chicken, multiply cost of bone-in by

legs

thighs

legs and thighs

breast

2.0

1.7

1.8

1.5

As additional help, keep in mind that

one pound (450 g) of bone-in breasts yields 10 to 11 ounces (280 to 310 g) of boneless

skinless breast meat

one pound (450 g) of thighs and drumsticks yields 8 ounces (225 g) of boneless skinless

dark meat

Other kinds of poultry

Today’s turkey farmers breed turkeys for their meatiness, with 35 to 40 percent of the

total weight in the breast, another 25 to 30 percent is leg meat. They sell turkey hens in 3 to 4

months that weigh about 13 pounds (5.9 kg). They allow tom turkeys to grow for 5 to 6 months

when they reach a weight of 22 to 26 pounds (10 to 12 kg) before they show up in the

supermarket. Hen and tom turkeys don't differ much in tenderness and moistness.

The most commonly sold turkey is whole or cut into steaks, breasts and leg meat.

Processors rework some into rolls, franks, bologna, sausage, salami and bacon, often mixed with

other ingredients and reformed into simulated breasts or roasts. They can control the texture and

flavor of the final product to be uniform and always predictable. True turkey lovers complain

that it doesn't resemble the real thing, and that is true. But it serves a purpose—it is a high-

protein, low-priced food for people on low budgets.

You can also buy turkey already smoked, breaded or marinated. Because of its low fat

content, turkey meat became immensely popular in America in the 1980s and 1990s. By the mid-

1990s, 75 percent of all turkeys sold in the U.S. was cut up or further processed. We eat the rest

almost entirely as whole roasted turkey during the holiday season. In the 1950s and 1960s,

Americans and Canadians ate 90 percent of turkey meat whole during the months of November

and December.

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