I Tried That Viral Chicken-Deboning "Hack" and Can Confirm It's Absurd

I said what I said.

In the early days of the internet, hopes ran high. It would be the great equalizer. It would democratize everything. Information would flow freely in ways no human could have ever imagined. In some ways, this has been true. But judging by the fatberg of "content" that has floated to the top of news feeds and search results everywhere, it's been just as much a failure.

This, it seems, is what happens when algorithms make the behaviors of users a critical signal in the "is this valuable?" equation. Because no matter how much we might like to pretend otherwise, most of us can't resist clicking on headlines like, "I Just Tried Harry Styles' Genius Toilet Paper Hack and My Life Is Now a Guaranteed Swipe Right." The more we click, the more we see stuff like that.

Which brings me to the latest in asinine internet ideas that never should have seen the light of day: the viral roast chicken deboning hack, which involves smashing a rotisserie chicken in a plastic bag. I caught wind of it a couple weeks ago as TikTok influencers followed by traffic-thirsty food sites published breathless endorsements of what is clearly a bad idea. "I tried it!" they proclaimed. It works and I'll never do it another way ever again!!!! Sure it works—about as well as moisturizing your skin with rendered beef fat, but that doesn't mean you should throw all your CeraVe in the trash.

I decided to write about how dumb the method is, but then I remembered that Serious Eats is about actually testing things. Could I really denounce it without trying it? Actually, yeah, I'm pretty sure I could, but proof is better than my confidence. So, in the spirit of the internet as we unfortunately know it today...

I Tried the Viral Chicken-Boning Hack and It Has Not Changed My Life One Bit

Though I questioned my sanity for even bothering to test this out, I bought two rotisserie chickens, one for the method in question and the other to do what I knew would be the better way. Can you guess which method was better?

Method 1: Boning Rotisserie Chicken in a Bag

What It Is: This hack purports to be the best way to shred and bone a rotisserie chicken. It involves placing a warm rotisserie chicken in a gallon zipper-lock freezer bag, sealing the bag, and then pressing down all over the bird to separate the meat from the bones. In videos on social media, this is followed by people reaching into the bag of flattened poultry and pulling out bones in wide-eyed amazement, exclaiming that this method is much easier, quicker, and mess-free than any other.

Here's how it went:

• After sliding a chicken into the bag, I realized I needed to wash my hands before I could seal the zipper lock.
  
  Note: This purportedly easy method requires an extra hand-washing step because you probably don't want to touch the outside of the zipper-lock bag with hands that have just been holding a greasy bird.
  
  

• I then began to press down. The bag immediately popped open as my pressing forced air out of it. Even after trying to push out the air and resealing, my bag popped open a second time, at which point I gave up trying to keep the bag closed and just did the best I could to mash the bird while preventing it from spilling out onto the counter.
  
  Note: The bag popped open because of air trapped inside it, which means that you not only have to put a chicken in the bag, but you also have to fiddle with pressing out excess air around the uneven topography (and hollow cavity) of a whole chicken. This is not difficult to do, but it is a small but annoying detail that proponents of the method fail to note. Perhaps the fact that the bag popped open twice was somehow a personal failing of mine, though I suspect I won't be the only person who finds it difficult to keep the bag sealed while mashing the bird.
  
  

• As I pressed on the chicken, the bones did indeed come out easily, but I was left with a question: How, through the mess of chicken mash, skin, and bone, could I tell if I'd pressed enough?
  
  Note: There is nothing impressive about the bones coming free easily—rotisserie chicken is cooked until well done and the bones are always on the verge of falling out. This sloppy method also makes it hard to know what is happening in the bag of squashed chicken, raising the risk that your chicken is going to get over-smushed in the effort to fully debone the bird. Smushed chicken is of very limited utility.
  
  

• Once I was fairly sure I'd pressed enough, I then had to fish out all the bones. But in the process of smashing the bones out of the chicken, I'd also rearranged the bird's skeleton, distributing its pieces throughout the mash. Ribs and vertebrae that were once in order were now scattered and buried in a pile of chicken mush.
  
  Note: Mashing the bones out of the chicken in this way is disorganized and leads to the additional need to sift through the bag afterwards in the hopes that you find all the bones. I struggled to find one of my bird's needle-like fibulae that was once reliably located in the drumstick, and, upon eating my smushed chicken meat later that night, discovered I had missed several more small bones and had to spit them out onto my plate.
  
  

• When I was finished, I was left with a zipper-lock bag that was too greasy to be easily washed and reused, equally greasy bone-searching hands, an unappealing mash of chicken in an inconsistent array of shred sizes, and lingering bone fragments that I had to hope wouldn't choke me or my kids.

Total Time: 5 minutes 30 seconds from bag stuffing through to giving up on bone hunting, and as it turns out, I shouldn't have given up when I did because there were still tiny bones mixed into the mashed chicken.

Method 2: The Obviously Better Boning Method

With my second rotisserie chicken, I tore off the legs and, in a couple deft moves, pulled the meat and bones apart, separating them into neat piles as I went. The bones came out instantly, as rotisserie chicken bones do, and I was able to keep track of them because I was working through the chicken methodically. The leg meat mostly remained in nice sized pieces and I had no concerns about bones being left behind. Then I tore off the breast meat in just a few large sections, popped the tender morsels from the meaty areas of the back, and finally pulled the bones from the wings.

This method:

• was faster;

• required no extra effort to hunt for bones;

• ensured my chicken meat was truly free of all bones;

• did not waste a plastic bag;

• required no extra trips to the sink to wash my hands beyond once before and once after;

• and didn't do any unnecessary dirtying of cookware because I shredded the chicken right in the container it came in, leaving the bones in a pile to be tossed with the container and placing the meat in a mixing bowl for whatever use I had planned.

• Bonus: Because I had pulled the meat off in larger pieces, I was free to decide whether to leave as-is, shred further, or chop. Those are decisions I, as a cook, like to be able to make.
  

Total Time: 3 minutes 10 seconds.

Conclusion

The smash-in-bag method is neither fast, effective, nor environmentally friendly, whereas simply pulling the meat off the bird with your hands is easy, faster, less wasteful, and yielded chicken free of bone fragments.

I hope I've convinced you that you don't need to waste a plastic bag to pull the meat off a rotisserie chicken. But I also hope that my larger point is clear: A test performed in a vacuum and lacking any kind of control—not to mention lacking a tester with real culinary experience—is unlikely to lead to valuable insights. But of course good advice isn't really the goal, grabbing your attention is, and tomorrow's life-changing hack is already being filmed to keep it.

Read the original article on Serious Eats.