When I eat chicken on the bone, there’s almost nothing left when I’m done. After I eat every last morsel of meat, I eat the ribs, and any other bones that look like they might be chewable, like the breastbone. Then I take the leg and thigh bones and bite off both ends, and eat the gristle and sinew. Then, if the chicken was cooked just right, I slurp out the wet, dark-red marrow from the bone like a straw. I eat the wings the same way. I just pop the neck and any vertebrae into my mouth whole and eat them like popcorn. Crunchy goodness.
People seem to think this is weird. Am I the only one who does this?
What? It’s delicious! That’s like half the flavor of the chicken right there!
Well, if you’ve ever seen a dog with a bone, you know how much he enjoys it. I think there’s something deep within our mammalian nature that craves meat right off the bone. It makes me feel close to my proto-hominid ancestors. Picture a caveman with a bone from a freshly killed mammoth. That’s me with a chicken.
That was my audible reaction upon reading the thread title, even before I opened it. Right now there’s an exasperated John Cleese homunculus in my head screaming “well don’t you even take the bones out,” with a complacent and unflapped imaginary cuauhtemoc responding in a somewhat dismissive manner “if I took the bones out, they wouldn’t be crunchy, now would they?”
I save the bones in the freezer until I have enough to make broth. Cook them in water for about three hours and THEN get the chickeny goodness of the bones.
I’ve tried beef marrow before and it tasted like death.
If I happen to get a chicken wing with a broken bone, it grosses me out to the point that I can’t eat it.
I suppose that puts us on opposite ends of the spectrum – but still, I’m not turning in my carnivore card.
I eat the wing tips and some of the ribs depending on softness. I’m not sure what you mean by biting off the leg and thigh bone ends. I love the crunchy cartilage caps on the ends of the bone but accessing the marrow would seem to take a lot more work. I do love me some beef bone marrow, maybe I’ll try it.
