Great Way to Shred Chicken

Just wanted to pass along a neat little trick I learned the other day.  Many recipes call for shredded chicken: enchiladas, tacos, pulled BBQ, soups, and casseroles.  Though I love all these recipes, my least favorite part is boiling the chicken and shredding it with two forks.  I was surfing the interwebs (as I like to call them) when I came across a way I had not thought of and I wanted to try it.  Did you know you can shred chicken in your KitchenAid stand mixer?

It's sitting there right on my counter, why had this not crossed my mind before? Genius

Why yes, yes you can!  I just proved it 2 days ago.  First boil some chicken in a big pot.  I start with Costco chicken breasts (still frozen) which are just enormous (those must be some big busted chickens down at the Dolly Parton ranch).  I put 4 -6 breasts in the pot of water and let it come to a boil for about 20-30 minutes.  While still warm I take them out of the water and placed them on a cutting board.  Now I guess most people would just toss the breasts whole right into the mixer, which you can do, but I wanted to get off all the fat clumps and get rid of some of the main veins and "undesirables", so I chopped them into big chunks of just pure chicken meat.  Plus I wasn't sure this was going to work so I wanted smaller pieces in there the first time around.

The key to this is making sure the chicken is still very warm, to make it easier on your mixer.  Cold or refrigerated chicken will not work as well.  I locked down my mixer and decided to go slow, at the lower setting and kind of pulsed it, to make sure chicken wasn't going to explode all over the kitchen.

After a few pulses I realized it was going to work, and increased the speed a little bit.

Shredded chicken in the KitchenAid mixer... hey that worked pretty good!

After a very short amount of time, I had beautiful shredded chicken!

It was a bit finer than if I had done it by hand.  More like what a professional restaurant might use.   Now it is ready to use in whatever recipe you want!  I happened to use this in my chicken enchilada recipe, which I will post about very soon.  Thanks and enjoy!