foodperson.com

A simple wooden spoon or cooking spoon with a long, rigid handle makes easy work of moving a whole chicken.

Just insert the spoon into the cavity, and lift! Voila! You can move your hot chicken (or cold chicken, for that matter) without burning yourself, tearing the skin or causing otherwise problems. And it’s so much easier than using tongs or lifting from underneath which risks dumping the bird in an undesirable location.

If you’ve got a particularly heavy or large chicken, you can do most of the lifting with a spoon inserted in the large cavity accessed between the chicken ‘s “ankles,” while using a second spoon at the neck end to steady the bird and give a little additional lift.

I might note that if the chicken in question has been cooked till it’s falling apart, lifting it by any means is a greater challenge. In that case, you can pull off the legs and thighs with tongs and move the rest of the carcass at least a short distance without losing anything.

In case you’re in the market, here’s a selection of cooking spoons available at Amazon, most of which would to the trick with no trouble.

p.s. Just to be clear: Put the bowl of the spoon into the chicken, not the handle end. If you insert the handle, there’s a reasonably good chance that one false move will send the handle through the other end, and you might wind up wearing a chicken bracelet. Beautiful, yes, but messy, and it might attract flies after a while.