Do It Yourself: Thinly Sliced Chicken Breast
There are some great chicken recipes that require the use of thinly sliced chicken breast. However the price can be a bit, well, pricey. If you are comfortable using a knife and are willing to practice a bit, you’ll find that you can start with skinless/boneless chicken breasts and end up with thinly sliced chicken breast at a fraction of the per pound price.
Skinless/boneless chicken breast looks like this (see picture below). Getting thinly sliced breasts requires the use of a sharp knife and a steady hand.
In this particular case, I decided to use a chef’s knife but a boning knife would work as well.
The key here is to cut the chicken breast horizontally by pressing your hand on the top of the chicken breast and slowly cutting while making sure you don’t cut too deeply - making the slice too thick - or not deep enough, thereby cutting your hand. However, if you go slowly and carefully, you’ll be able to adjust the angle of the knife so that you get the desired result and still have all your fingers intact.
The result is something like this.
Notice that the slices are so thin that you can see right through it. (Yes, those are my fingers on the underside of the chicken breast.) If you have started with a fairly thick chicken breast, you’ll be able to get two thin slices out of it (sometimes you can squeeze out a third). I’ll often buy a large package of chicken breasts, slice them all thin, wrap them in clear wrap and freeze them.
If there are 1,000 recipes in the world (okay, probably more like 1,000,000 but bear with me) then there are 1,000 ways to store those recipes. Here’s one method: store them in a binder. This method uses clear plastic sheets and an ordinary binder with page dividers. The plastic sheets protect the pages from small accidental spills
