Today, I shredded a ton of chicken.
A few months ago, my husband and I found a fabulous deal on fresh, boneless, skinless chicken breasts, and we bought a 30 pound box of it. Well, that was not a great week for us as far as time went, so rather than take the time that we didn't have to bag the chicken in individual baggies, we just threw the whole box into the freezer without thinking about it...
A week later we realized our huge mistake! Inside that box were 4 large bags full of chicken... so we had 4 big blocks of frozen chicken that weighed between 6 - 10 pounds each!
Well, we let the first one thaw in the fridge and we used about 3 pounds of chicken before it went bad. I felt sick to my stomach having to throw that much meat away. I wasn't about to do that again. SO... we decided to do this...
This was my last block of frozen chicken, I won't be freezing chicken in blocks again... EVER!
NOTES:
- Over cooking it in the water will not dry it out!
- Let it cool on the stove top until it's cool enough that your pan wont ruin the shelf in your fridge, then be SURE to refrigerate it.
- Work as quickly as you can once you put warm water in the pot. If the chicken gets too warm, your are risking promoting bacteria growth.
- You CAN shred your chicken cold, I just had a lot to do all at once and I didn't want frozen painful fingers by the end. Not fun.
I then put the chicken into small sandwich baggies then put those baggies into Gallon sized Freezer Bags. The Sandwich bags are a lot cheaper than the Quart sized freezer bags, and I've found that (since I am not going to use all the shredded chicken at once) this actually ended up saving money too. I left one Sandwich baggie in the fridge to use, and put the rest (inside the gallon bag) in the freezer.
Hopefully some of you find this useful. Oh! And, just so you know, it took me less :) than ten minutes to shred that whole pot!
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