Get your mind out of the gutter. It’s a method of cutting up a chicken for better roasting. You cut out the backbone, break the breastbone, and essentially unfold the chicken so it lays flat. This makes the chicken cook more evenly and avoids over and/or undercooking.
It’s not really difficult to prep a raw chicken like this. But it’s not really difficult to cut up a chicken into pieces either. Stores make a profit by selling cut-up chickens. So why don’t they sell chickens that are already prepped for spatchcock roasting? Are stores afraid that shoppers wouldn’t be familiar with a spatchcocked chicken? It’s not that uncommon a technique and you’d figure stores would be eager to demonstrate a new and improved way to cook chicken (and get people to buy more chicken).
Fwiw, i roast chickens all the time, and it’s easy and reliable. I tried spatchcocking once, and i looked at this enormous thing that didn’t fit in any of my roasting pans, and so i cut it up the rest of the way into parts and assembled them on my broiling pan.
But yeah, I doubt most stores would sell enough of them to make it worthwhile paying employees to prepare chickens this way except for custom requests.
I’d figure they’d figure that spatchcocking/butterflying per se is unlikely to convince anyone to buy a chicken who wasn’t already going to buy a chicken, and it requires expending extra time and labor that customers might not want to pay for.
I’ve also seen – and I don’t know if there’s a different name for this, something similar to a spatchcocked bird, but instead of the backbone being cut out and the bird being flattened with the breast in the middle, the backbone is left intact and the bird is simply cut right through the middle of the breast bone, so when spread out, there’s half a breast at either end. Maybe reverse spatchcock?
It’s almost impossible around here to find a whole chicken cut into parts. Either it’s a package of wings, or legs or thighs, or breasts, but rarely all the parts together. I’ll buy a whole chicken and spatchcock it and like others have said, just continue to cut into pieces. I don’t want a back piece anyway!
When I grill a whole chicken i cut it up into pieces including the back. And i eat the back. I really like chewing on grilled chicken back. Yeah, weird. But i like it, and it makes the other pieces nicer, so that’s how i do it.
OK, because a “deboned” chicken is also a thing – where it’s completely deboned.
I do see several Google hits relating to “reverse spatchcock” describing the other style of spatchcocking I mentioned. It doesn’t seem to be a popular style, but it is mentioned in several places, including here in the oregano chicken recipe: PressReader.com - Digital Newspaper & Magazine Subscriptions
I want to say I encountered it in a chicken restaurant in Johannesburg, South Africa. I’m not entirely sure, though, just that I was served a whole chicken in that manner at some restaurant and was a little surprised by where the cut was.
I’m sure I would find people in the butcher department who would spatchcock a chicken for me if I asked. And I imagine there are some stores out there somewhere selling them already prepped. But in several decades of regular grocery shopping, I have never seen a spatchcocked chicken already prepped and on sale.
Hmm – I’m looking through the grocery store circular, and I may be misremembering – I’ll have to check tomorrow. I might just be thinking of their whole, cut-up chicken. I would never buy an already spatchcocked bird myself as I want to save that backbone for the stockpot and because whole chicken is cheaper than broken down chicken. But what I thought was a spatchcocked bird may have just been a whole, cut-up bird with all the pieces vaguely where they came from. It occurs to me that maybe the packaging of a spatchcocked bird could be a little awkward.
It’s like buying stew meat. It’s cheaper to buy a whole piece of meat and cut it up into chunks when you get home. But stores are able to sell already cut up meat and people pay a higher price for it because of the convenience.
Oh, sure, I understand. And the even bigger problem with “stew meat” is you don’t even know what cut it is. If you know your meat cuts, you can make an informed guess, of course. Usually, though, it’s not the chuck that I’m looking for – it’s something leaner, like a bottom round or rump or similar. I simply do not buy stew meat not because it’s already cut up but because I specifically want certain cuts (chuck or boneless short ribs, typically) when I’m stewing and not anything else.
But I think the packaging of the spatchcocked cut might be the problem. I suppose you can still fold it over to package, though.
Stores which sell marinated chicken may spatchcock them. But I would guess this is not routine because a) it is extra work that b) many people do not want to pay more for since c) it is easy to do at home if desired and d) some people stuff chickens or do not aesthetically want this since e) they may use the extra bones for soup which f) may also increase the weight of the bird, which may profit the supermarket or store selling it.
In other words, they sell marinated spatchcock chicken at a higher price. Many prefer cheaper chicken. Stores include bones as part of the weight, so charge a higher price for lighter products. And not everyone grills chicken, they best use for spatchcockery.
Ask at the butcher counter. There are always a few prepackaged marinated chickens at one of the supermarkets I go to, another supermarket rarely has them. But they’re not just butterflied birds; they are all marinated and not prepared in store.
