Chicken Cuts

What the plate gets wrong

The picture was generated, and these are its errors of fact, checked against the kitchen and the Lexicon. Read the plate with them.

• Neck prints “Neck (Bone-in), with a photo of thick marbled slabs”. Trust the words on the card and not the picture, because a chicken neck is a slender skin-on cylinder about the width of a finger, while the photo shows chop-thick marbled pieces that look like pork neck bones. Chicken necks are long and thin with almost no marbling, and the pictured pieces have the thickness and intramuscular fat of pork neck bones.
• Thigh prints “Thigh (Boneless or Bone-in); Bone-in Thigh; Boneless Thigh”. Read the three thigh cards as one cut sold two ways, bone-in or boneless, not as three different cuts. Bone-in and boneless thighs are the same muscle group with or without the bone, and the right-column Thigh card already names both forms before the bottom row repeats them.
• Liver & Gizzard prints “Sauté, Braise”. Sauté the liver quickly and braise or simmer the gizzard, because the two organs need opposite treatment and the shared line does not say which method belongs to which. The liver has almost no connective tissue and turns grainy when overcooked, while the gizzard is a tough working muscle whose connective tissue only softens with long moist cooking.