We’re always on the hunt for tricks to make cooking easier, and TikTok is the best place to discover new kitchen hacks. Some of them have quite literally changed our lives—like using parchment paper to achieve crispy salmon skin and shaving thin strips of butter with a vegetable peeler for our morning slices of toast.
Some other ones we’ve tried have admittedly been disappointing, however. Building a makeshift stand mixer using wire racks? What a flop. Blowing hard boiled eggs to remove the shell? A total fail. Sometimes you need to encounter a few duds before you discover a hack that actually works.
I had a strong feeling that this chicken trick, posted by user @superiodo0, was going to be a winner. In the video, a woman transfers a rotisserie chicken to a gallon-sized resealable bag. And after giving the bird a deep tissue massage, the meat is seamlessly shredded without any mess.
As a devout rotisserie chicken lover, I was excited to try the hack for myself. So I grabbed the most affordable chicken in town (from Costco, obviously) and brought it back to the Delish Kitchen Studio to give it a try.
The TikTok promises that this is the easiest way to keep your hands clean. But shredding the chicken through a plastic barrier is easier said than done. I had to really work for it, frequently adjusting the bag and using a lot of pressure. It took me close to 10 minutes to actually get the meat off the bones.
Speaking of bones, that’s one element of this hack that’s notably omitted from the TikTok. This trick technically shreds chicken without any mess—but you still need to get your hands dirty to pull out the carcass.
By the time I finished searching for the bones and pulling them out of the bag, my fingers were covered in grease and chicken juice. I would have gotten just as messy shredding the chicken the old-fashioned way. And, if we’re being honest, it would have been much faster too.
I went into this test with high hopes and left disappointed. But at least I ended up with some chicken.
