Tips & Techniques
A 5-Second Hack for Better Chicken Breasts
Thanks to TikTok, your dinner can now be a winner (winner).
Chicken breasts are a staple in my kitchen. Crisped up, doused in marinara sauce and mozzarella, poached with milk and herbs—I've cooked them every which way. Normally, the prep is pretty easy (and by prep, I mean taking them out of the package). But there's one thing that's consistently a pain: removing those the stringy, tough tendons.
You know which ones I mean: The unsightly white stuff that just hangs off the cut. Do you carefully try to slice them off, only to hack off hunks of precious meat? Or do you simply ignore them, turning a blind eye to those unsavory bits?
As a lazy cook, I normally do the latter (dousing the whole thing in bread crumbs helps you forget they're even there). But I also couldn't help but watch—first in skepticism, then in awe—as TikTok user Mandy Klentz shared a brilliant hack for extracting them from chicken breasts in five seconds flat.
All you need is a fork and a towel (try a paper towel or something sturdier, like a kitchen towel). Oh, and some chicken breasts.
It's so simple. All you have to do is slide the fork under the tendon at one end of the chicken breast, then using the fork to hold the chicken in place, you grab the end of the tendon with a paper towel and pull up. In one single, glorious motion the chicken is freed from its tendon-y sheath (sorry, gross) and ready to cook with.
If over four million views and 600,000 likes is any proof, I'm not the only one that finds this hack miraculous.
Don't believe me? Give it a watch for yourself. Spicy orange-ginger chicken, pepita-crusted cutlets, and all the piccata you could ever want awaits.
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Written by: Erin Alexander
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10 Comments
Very helpful and much appreciated.
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