The Easiest and Quickest Way to Shred Chicken

Like many home cooks, I’ve spent hours shredding pounds and pounds of chicken for supposedly “quick and easy” weeknight meals. People often use their hands or a pair of forks to shred meat, but it’s a time-consuming process, especially when you want the meat finely shredded. Luckily for all of us, there’s an easy, foolproof way to shred chicken with minimal mess.

The method is simple: You place cooked boneless, skinless chicken into a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, then turn it on medium speed. (You can also use a large bowl and an electric hand mixer—more on that below.) It’s a clever tip the chef and cookbook author Marcela Valledolid showed me when I was a food stylist on the Today Show, and it’s the only way I shred chicken now, including my recipe for Buffalo chicken parathas. The power of the paddle quickly and efficiently shreds the poultry, making light work of an otherwise mildly annoying task. 

It’s a useful technique that speeds up prep for dishes like enchiladas, chicken salad, chicken tinga, soups and stews, and more.

How to Shred Chicken Using a Mixer

To avoid overcrowding your bowl and straining your mixer, I recommend shredding no more than 12 ounces of boneless chicken at a time (that’s about half the meat from a whole roast chicken). Just put the cooked boneless chicken in the stand mixer bowl, then start paddling on low speed. While a stand mixer can handle just about all the work, it can help to break the chicken down into large chunks, just to get things started.

As the pieces of chicken become smaller, you can increase the speed of your mixer to medium to help move it along. Avoid paddling the chicken at high speed, as that can result in pieces flying out of the bowl, and don’t walk away or you may come back to a bowlful of mush.

This method works with a hand mixer, too: Just be sure to hold the bowl tightly so it doesn’t go spinning out of control once the mixer is on. And, since a hand mixer has smaller beaters and no paddle attachment, you’ll need to break the chicken down a bit more to begin so that the mixer can grab onto it.

You can use this method to shred other kinds of meat, too: Try it with smoked pork shoulder for speedy pulled pork sandwiches or turkey for a Thanksgiving leftovers pot pie.