Boneless Chicken Ranch

Greasy, gamy and gross. For many years that’s been my opinion of the dark chicken meat from the leg and thigh area. I remember the day I suddenly realized how I and countless other kids have been tricked into coveting the drumstick, as if it was the prized piece of the bird instead of the gnarly collection of tendons that it is. The chief propaganda piece being the Kentucky Fried Chicken commercials in the 1970’s showing some little twerp clambering for the inferior leg piece as if it were a treat the adults were sacrificing for him. Doubtless they needed to drum up demand for the piece of chicken that no thinking person would want. Fast forward several years to the early 90’s – I’m reading a promotional piece about the special Christmas dinner available at the Stanford Park Hotel restaurant, The Duck Club. They were serving traditional Christmas goose (what tradition?) and they explained how the legs and thighs were separated from the breast and roasted longer because their higher fat content required more cooking. Around the same time I ate dinner of roasted chicken thighs at my parents’ house and amazingly they were good. At this point I’m thinking there might be some hope for the half of the chicken I had written off. I think roasting a whole chicken is a hassle because the part that faces down is slimy and pallid unless you play human rotisserie for an hour. Therefore I got into the habit of butterflying a whole chicken (cutting out the backbone) and roasting it flat on a cookie sheet. It cooked faster and all the skin was crispy with no micromanaging. One time, when I was tending to a roasting chicken with tongs, the breast assembly easily separated from the leg/thigh assemblies. I checked the temperature of the breast and it was 160 degrees and needed to come out so it wasn’t like eating a piece of canvas. I decided to let the legs and thighs go a little longer. About 15 minutes later I pulled them out and the temperature was around 200 degrees. The skin was crispy and the meat was fall apart tender and moist without any characteristic greasiness. Dare I say it was tastier than the breast meat. I followed this Stanford Park Hotel goose cooking principle for a couple years until the other night when I was in the mood to make things more complicated. I remember from my idyllic childhood hearing my dad brag about his ability to bone a chicken and a duck (My dad can execute a few esoteric dishes very well but can’t fry an egg, boil pasta or assemble a normal sandwich). This concept has been flapping around in the back of my mind for years so I decided to give it a try. Boneless meat cooks faster than bone-in meat so my idea was to bone the leg/thigh but not the breast so they would all be done to my satisfaction at the same time. I butterflied the chicken by removing the backbone with kitchen shears, giving easy access to the thigh bone. I probed the boning knife around the thigh bone and scraped, almost like I was whittling the meat off, until the bone let go and came out pretty cleanly. I then cut any tissue and tendons at the base end of the drumstick (leg) bone, much like you would cut the foil around the top of a wine bottle with a knife. I then approached the other end of the leg bone with the boning knife from the underside of the thigh area and used the same whittling technique. I was trying not to disrupt the structural integrity of the chicken and, although it may be technically incorrect, it seemed to work pretty well. With the southern bones gone I salted and peppered the skin side of the chicken and seared it in a hot, oiled sauté pan on the stove. After a few minutes I flipped it to skin side up and put it in a 400 degree oven to finish cooking. I can’t remember how much longer it took until the breast was 160 degrees, probably 20 minutes, but that’s when I pulled it out (cooking time would change with the weight - this was chicken was only three pounds). While the chicken was resting on a plate I made a pan sauce in the sauté pan it roasted in, finishing it at the end with the juices the chicken expelled on the plate. The legs and thighs were not only cooked well but were very easy to eat without those pesky bones.

You could pay $20 in a restaurant per person for this meal that cost me approximately $5 total to prepare.