When you first think about it, 40 pounds of chicken sounds like quite a bit. Unless you have a very large family and go through a large amount of meat in a week, how are you going to eat that up?
The first thing to do is to estimate about how much meat your family will eat with each meal. Our family of 5 uses about 2 pounds of chicken per meal. That makes enough for the meal and a little for leftovers for lunch the next day. That means 40 pounds of chicken will give us roughly 20 different meals.
What exactly do we do with all that chicken when we bring it home? Many things!
Chicken Breast
When we bring home 40 pounds of chicken breast we do a few different things with it, they are:
- Dice into cubes
- Marinate and vacuum seal
- Put some straight into the freezer as is, 3 breasts per bag
- Grind some into ground chicken
A little pre-planning (and several freezer bags and vacuum sealer bags) and I can do this by myself with about an hour.
Chicken Thighs
We do a bit less with chicken thighs. I trim off a bit of fat first and then we:
- Dice into pieces for stir fry
- Put into the freezer as is, 5 thighs to a bag
This takes roughly the same time as working on the chicken breasts since I prefer to trim the thighs a bit before freezing them.
All of these options are easy and make the most of our 40 pound boxes of chicken. There are many different meals that can be prepped as you can see above or you can simply put several of the pieces of meat into a quart or gallon freezer bag and do something with them when you pull them out later for a meal.