Buy a whole chicken and #CookEveryPart. Top tips from the Cookpad community.

We all know that being more resourceful in the kitchen makes sense right now, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be boring.

Luckily, with a diverse community of home cooks at our fingertips, it can be delicious and fun! Through Cookpad you can discover new ways to cook some of your favourite ingredients, learn techniques to transform your food, or share some of your own knowledge for other cooks to try.

To test the theory we set a challenge last year to #CookEveryPart of a chicken to see what recipes and tips we could learn from our amazing cooks. The results are in…

Technique = taste
Whether it’s prepping an ingredient properly or knowing how to achieve a certain texture, technique can elevate the recipes you already cook, and are the building blocks for future food experiments. Malou shared a tip on how to achieve incredibly tender poached chicken, by plunging it into ice cold water after it was cooked (a technique used when making delicious Hainanese chicken), the chicken becomes incredibly juicy and tender, a simple way to improve flavour without needing a recipe, 'see for yourself' says Malou!

Malou's tip "Plunging poached chicken into ice water straight after cooking will result in deliciously tender meat"

Don't throw out your bones!
No one wants to waste food, especially when it turns out to be incredibly tasty! Take Linda’s recipe for homemade chicken stock, using a leftover chicken carcass. 'This is the PERFECT part of the chicken' shares Linda, 'that’ll give you the richest stock as it holds all the flavour'. Linda used spices like cardamom and cinnamon to flavour her stock which could then be used to make a fragrant broth or soup. Risotto, soup or stews made with homemade chicken stock are infinitely more flavourful than recipes made with a shop bought stock cube. By simply adding water and some store cupboard staples to your chicken bones you can create the base to a whole new meal, taking your dishes to the next level, too.

Try something new
Utilising the whole animal is a great skill to learn, it cuts down on waste, opens up new recipes and flavours, and is almost always money-saving, too. The trick is to make trying new cuts tasty and easy. Ever thought about how to cook chicken neck? A cheap and flavorful cut of chicken not commonly utilised. By sharing a recipe using her mum’s favourite part of a chicken (and how to prepare it), Linda has empowered us all to be a little braver and give something new a go!

'My mom loves chicken necks. You’ll be surprised how much meat the neck holds and it’s sooo tasty and rich in flavour.'

And how do you #CookEveryPart of the chicken?