You’ve likely heard the term “spatchcock” before if you’ve ever looked into cooking a turkey for Thanksgiving or chicken for a dinner dish and wondered, “what the heck does that mean?!”
Spatchcocking, simply, means to butterfly. You just have to remove the backbone of the poultry you are about to smoke so it lays flat and this will, in turn, shorten the cooking time. It’ll also allow more surface area to cook evenly.
A lot of home cooks spatchcock their Thanksgiving turkey so they aren’t spending hours watching their oven or smoker!
To spatchcock: place the bird breast side down and have the neck facing you.
- Grab the neck with one hand and use a sharp kitchen shears to cut along the bird’s spine
- Make sure you are separating the spine from the ribs
- Cut on both sides of the spine all the way down to the tail of the bird
- Then, open the bird and lay flat for seasoning!
