If you have chicken breast or chicken tenders but not ground chicken, you can still make chicken wontons or chicken wonton soup, by grinding your own chicken.
Preparing ground chicken for wonton recipes means you can make this tasty filling quickly and easily. Ground chicken (or minced chicken) needs to be chopped very finely, and the simplest way of doing it is to push the chicken through a grinder. Choose a medium-coarse grind setting.
These old-fashioned meat grinders can be very handy. Did you ever see your mom or grandmother using one? They are made of iron and you simply insert your meat and crank the handle, and out comes ground meat! Yes, you can use your ground chicken for wonton recipes very easy and make it cheaply too. Just get a grinder!
For $20 or so, you can add one of these to your kitchen and you can use it for any kind of meat, not just chicken. Grinding your own meat means you can control how much fat goes into it too, unlike in the store where you simply grab a package of hamburger meat and hope it’s not too fatty.
Ground Chicken for Wonton Recipes: The Food Processor Method
If you have a food processor, you can fit a sharp blade in the processor base (not the slicing blade you use to slice vegetables) and then pulse the chicken until it is the correct consistency.
Do it in batches and pulse it very briefly, as you are looking for ground chicken not chicken sausage-meat.
It is perhaps easiest to get the right consistency if you use partially thawed chicken, so if you are thawing some frozen chicken to make your chicken wontons, grind it halfway through thawing.
Another option for making ground chicken for wonton recipes is to ask your butcher to grind some chicken for you. In some grocery stores you can buy pre-ground chicken, but not all of them.
Ground turkey can be used instead in most wonton recipes and that should be easy enough to find (Jenny O is one popular brand).
Best Cheap Meat Grinder, on Amazon (also grinds vegetables, makes pasta and stuffs sausages)