Whole chicken substitutes

The direct swap for roast chicken, chicken and rice, sheet pan chicken and anything where you were going to carve the bird anyway.

Best for

roast chicken dinners, sheet pan chicken and vegetables, braises and stews, chicken and rice, barbecue and grilling

This is usually better than the whole bird, not worse, and the reason is that a whole chicken is a compromise: the breast is done at 160F and the thighs want 175F, so one of them is always slightly wrong. With parts you control each one. What you lose is the presentation of a whole roasted bird and the pan juices the carcass contributes, which are richer than the juices from parts alone. Cut the cooking time by roughly half to two-thirds: figure thirty-five to forty-five minutes at 425F rather than an hour and a quarter. Spread the pieces skin side up in a single layer with space between them, or they steam instead of browning.

The cheapest and most forgiving substitute, giving you all dark meat, plenty of skin and bones for the pan juices.

Best for

roasting, braises and stews, chicken and rice, slow cooker recipes, budget family dinners, curry

Richer and more savoury than a whole bird, since it is all dark meat with a good fat layer under the skin, and much harder to overcook. The difference someone will notice at the table is that there is no white meat at all, which matters if half the household prefers breast. Leg quarters roast in about forty to fifty minutes at 425F. They also render a lot of fat, so a tray of them in a shallow pan will make anything underneath greasy unless you raise them on a rack or on top of thickly sliced potatoes that can absorb it.

Other whole birds, for the recipes where roasting something intact is the actual point.

Best for

roast dinners and holiday tables, spatchcocked and butterflied roasts, beer can chicken, chicken in brodo, recipes calling for a whole bird

Cornish hens are just very young small chickens, so they taste the same and roast in about forty-five minutes to an hour, and two of them serve two to four people the way a small chicken would. Going the other direction, a capon of eight to ten pounds or a small turkey of ten to twelve pounds is a fattier, more forgiving roast that feeds six to eight, and it needs two to three hours rather than one. Whichever bird you use, cook to temperature and not to time: 165F in the thickest part of the breast and 175F in the thigh.

The right answer when the whole chicken in your recipe was destined for the stockpot rather than the oven.

Best for

chicken stock and broth, bone broth, soup bases, ramen and pho broth, matzo ball soup

This is the case where boneless parts genuinely will not do. What a whole chicken brings to a stock is not meat, it is bones, skin, joints and cartilage, which release collagen that becomes gelatin and gives the broth its body, the slightly lip-sticking quality that makes it taste like something rather than salty water. Wings are the best value because they are almost all joint, and necks, backs and feet are better still and often nearly free from a butcher. A stock built from these will be at least as good as one from a whole bird, sometimes better, and you get no cooked meat out of it, so if the recipe also wanted shredded chicken, poach a couple of thighs separately.

The shortcut for soups, salads, enchiladas, pot pies and anything where the chicken gets pulled apart.

Best for

chicken soup, chicken salad, enchiladas and tacos, pot pie, casseroles, sandwiches

Saves an hour and works cleanly, with two caveats. Supermarket rotisserie birds are heavily brined and seasoned, so the meat is noticeably saltier than plain poached chicken and often carries garlic, paprika or lemon flavour, which means you should salt the rest of the dish at the end rather than the start. And it is fully cooked, so add it in the last five minutes of a simmer, not at the beginning, or it goes stringy. Do not throw away the carcass: simmer it with an onion and a carrot for two hours and you have the stock the original recipe was going to make.

What most people actually have in the freezer, workable for some recipes and genuinely wrong for others.

Best for

curries and stews where meat is shredded or cubed, casseroles, quick weeknight versions of slow recipes

Say the honest thing: this works in a curry or a casserole and it does not work for roast chicken, chicken in brodo or any stock. Bones and skin are not extras, they are where the flavour, the gelatin and the pan juices come from, and boneless meat gives you a thin, watery, faintly bland result in those dishes. If it is all you have, use a good stock instead of water, add a tablespoon of butter or oil to replace the skin fat, and cook it far less: boneless thighs need twenty-five to thirty minutes in a braise and breasts fifteen to twenty, against an hour or more for a whole bird. Because a 4 lb bird is only about 2.5 to 3 lb of edible meat, buy less than the whole-bird weight, not the same.