Boil it once and you have both the meat and the stock. The next four days divide them.
A whole chicken at an American supermarket runs close to two kilos, and by the pound it's among the cheapest ingredients Korean cooking asks for. Boil it once and there's plenty of meat left over. For most people that's where it ends: the water goes down the drain and the bones go in the trash.
This plan runs on a different axis than the three before it. A head of napa cabbage separated into parts, tofu lost its shape to time, pork was divided on day one for the freezer. All three asked **how to divide something you bought**. Chicken is different — the cooking creates the ingredient. Stock that didn't exist before the pot exists after it, which is why day one can't move.
A whole chicken here usually weighs 1.8–2.3 kg. When a Korean recipe says 닭 한 마리, it generally means a young bird of about a kilo, so the same phrase can mean twice the chicken. Rather than following the written amounts, scale the water and seasoning to the bird you actually bought.
What matters more than the cut is **whether the bones are still in**. Boneless skinless breast is convenient and yields no stock — half of this plan disappears. If a whole bird is too much, bone-in thighs or drumsticks work fine. What comes out of the bones and skin carries three of these five days.
Put the chicken in water and bring it up. Skim the grey foam that rises at the first boil. Add 대파, onion, whole garlic and peppercorns, and leave it until the meat pulls away from the bone. Lift it out and **let it cool before you pick it** — hot meat burns your fingers and shreds, which makes Tuesday's salad harder.
Strain the stock, then cool it in several shallow containers. A full pot in the refrigerator takes hours to cool through the middle. Once cold, the fat sets white on top; lift it off with a spoon. Then portion it **into single servings** — kept in one container, measuring out just what Wednesday needs turns into a chore.
Day one produces both the meat and the stock. Days two and four take the meat, days three and five take the stock. Move day one and nothing after it works.
The day the whole bird goes in the pot. Get this one right and the other four are mostly a matter of taking things out.
See recipe→The picked meat. The recipe starts by boiling chicken, but you did that yesterday, so skip that step. Nothing here needs the stove.
See recipe→The stock's turn. Where the recipe calls for 700 g of water, pour in yesterday's stock instead. Cold rice from day one makes it faster still.
See recipe→Clears the last of the meat along with the cold rice. The 수삼 and 대추 in the recipe are optional — leave them out if you couldn't find them.
See recipe→The last of the stock. The recipe says to build a broth from dried anchovies and kelp; use the chicken stock in its place.
See recipe→Stock spoils faster the longer it sits hot. Several shallow containers cool far quicker than one deep pot. Once it's cold, lift off the fat that has set on top — leaving it makes every reheating heavier, and a spoonful of it is good in Thursday's fried rice.
Three days in the refrigerator is a fair limit. This plan runs five days and uses stock on days three and five, so **send day five's portion to the freezer when you first divide it**. Frozen in an ice cube tray, it's easy to drop one or two into a stir-fry or a stew later on.
This is what the five dishes need. Apart from the chicken on day one, most of it keeps.
Tofu and an egg make Friday's stew more filling. 백김치 usually means a trip to a Korean market; without it, rinse ordinary kimchi under water and Tuesday's salad still works.
The gram amounts in the linked recipes come straight from the public dataset, where they serve as reference values for measuring nutrition. The 90 g of chicken in 닭곰탕 is less than one person's share, so cooking it as written won't make a meal.
What this plan fixes is the order, not the grams. Size the bird and the water on day one to however many people you're feeding.
Cooked, picked meat holds about three days in the refrigerator, and the stock is similar. Stock going off smells sour and turns tacky on the surface. Meat that has gone slippery or smells won't come back with heat.
When you reheat, bring it to a real boil rather than warming it through. Repeated warm-and-cool cycles are worse than a couple of extra days — which is the reason for portioning in the first place. When in doubt, don't.