Notice how I instinctively avoided using ‘boning’ along with meat in the title.
Anyway, For health sake I am trying to stir-fry a lot these days. For money sake I am buying chicken leg quarters for the aforementioned stir-frying.(yes I realize Dark meat is slightly less healthy and breast meat, I’m okay with that.
But how the hell do you get the leg quarter into stir-fryable pieces? In attempting to retrieve the dark meat off the bone, I spend 15 minutes per piece and end up with two or three decent pieces of meat, and a big pile of chicken muscle hash, which just burns in the wok.
Does anybody know of a guide that explains this process? I know Chinese restaurants like to use dark meat for better taste and cost, so I know it is possible. Any tips?
OK … first, sit down and play with the leg quarter get a couple to experiment with.
Pick it up, and move the leg and thigh around in your hands. Flex the joint.
Start by inserting a knife into the joint between the leg and thigh to separate them.
Pick up the leg and take a small paring knife. Gently draw it the length of the leg to slice the skin. Using your hands peel the skin off the leg. Gently massage the whole of the leg to feel how the muscle moves against the bone. Notice there is a long thin needlelike bone parallelling the leg bone. Take a knife and gently cut a circle around the leg at each end just under the ends so you avoid the bulb of cartillage at the ends. Cut the muscle along the length of the leg and using your hands separate the meat from the leg bone. Then you can trim out the little tendons at the ends of the muscles and pull out that little bone sliver. That flap of meat can be cut into strips for frying now. With the thigh, you are dealing with 2 bones socketed together. If you manipulate the thigh in your hands you can feel this. Start by peeling off the skin. There is going to be a nugget of meat along the end of one bone that is the remennant of where the thigh was attached to the body. Depending on how the bird was parted out, spine might also be along one edge. You need to also sever the muscle where it is attached to the bone, much like you did with the leg. The bones are in sort of an L shape, find the end of the smaller bone, and you can work the knife in and slice around the end of the bone. Flex the bones until you can isolate the joint and pop it apart with your knife, and proceed pretty much like with the leg.
Notice, you do a lot of pulling the meat off with your hands, it isnt so easy as a breast, where you get big slabs of meat. The leg and thigh are small muscles banded in intricate patterns to get the leverage to move the legs to walk. Just work on a few sets to learn how they are jointed and muscled … and be patient.
Warning - PDF chicken anatomy pp 21 of this PDF document is the skeleton of the chicken …
If you look at it, H, G and F are the bones in question. See how they are jointed together? If you sit there and manually peel apart the various muscles a few times to see how everything is interconnected on the thigh, it gets easier to separate out the meat for stirfrying =)
It seems like people nowdays are reluctant to play with food or even get meat juice all over their hands … they just want to buy the convenient stuff instead of learning to part out their own critters.
Now if you want a challenge, teach yourself to debone an entire chicken with a single cut around the ends of each drumstick, at the joint between the wing and the breast and a single cut down the length of the chicken along the breastbone [to make a ballotin of chicken, you stuff it with a farce and make it shaped as if you never removed the carcass from inside :p]
