Deboning & Stuffing CHICKEN LEGS – Classic French Recipe with Black Truffles

Please be sure to have your YouTube ANNOTATIONS turned ON in order to see the ingredients and other printed directions.

This video is a follow-up to my recent recipe on deboning and stepping wild duck legs is a classic technique that every serious cook should master what I’m showing you here is the plain vanilla version though straight out of 18th century France there are some notes at

The end of this video on how to take this to the next level that will impress absolutely anyone the technique is not really difficult to master for chicken for duck and other wild birds it does take some experience because the skin doesn’t come away from the meat so

Easily and there are more tendons that are difficult to remove chicken is where you should practice first and the results from this will be delicious okay I got at me some flaws I’ve got 60 grams of onion 30 grams of sorry 30 grams of carrot cut up get some chicken stock

Standing by some time I’m going to tear off with a clove of garlic white peppercorns is wine standing over here I’m going to begin softening these vegetables using a heavy bottomed pan and the pan is not hot yet it’s just barely warm butters just starting to melt

We’re not looking to Brown these we want to sweat them for quite a while in a low temperature we don’t want to we not want to Brown these at all that’s what I’m using very heavy bottom pan it’s always a good idea because thin pans will have

Hot spots in them and that’s where you get your browning it’s been seven minutes now in a medium heat vegetables are starting to soften certainly no browning see one now I’m going to add the garlic to it you want to add the garlic beginning because it burns easier than any of the other

Vegetables operated in hand 45 milliliters about one and a half ounces of sherry you can use white wine if you don’t have sherry maybe you just preferred sherry use a better choice though and I’m going to keep cooking this until it becomes almost dry it’s been another six or

Seven minutes now this is dry enough it doesn’t have to be you just want it to be like syrupy and thick if you were to cool this down this would be very thick and sticky so I’m going to add an animal’s of chicken stock the and ground white pepper and the thyme

Fresh thyme and we’re going to reduce this down some more back to the same level once again heats like I’m five and a half I’m ten now here we are after the third seven-minute section so it’s been about twenty-one minutes since I started this now you can see that most of the

Moisture is gone may need to taste it a little bit and add salt make sure that it’s fairly salty because you’re going to mix this with chicken meat that has no salt in it at all say this is your seasoning mix it needs to be salty after you’re satisfied that you’ve got the

Right salt level just kill the heat leave it there let it cool navigate begin working with the chicken okay much like the duck leg we’re going to begin with the printing of this chicken leg it’s really a much easier process uncheck it because this everything softer there’s few tendons there not

Nearly something nasty and difficult to work with this is this is definitely where you want to begin your practice on the sort of thing but once again you have to be careful not to break the bone they’ll go crazy because it’s you know chickens just flesh and blood it’s not a

Not a machine with metal parts twist this often okay here’s the end of that now unlike the duck where we need pliers or the chicken we can take these these tendons that are sticking out just pull them out with your with your fingers like that get rid of them

You just keep keep working at it ticket all the ones that are protruding from this cut get get rid of all of them when you’re satisfied you’ve got all of those you turn it over and that depending on where you get this chicken quarter from you may have gotten some rib bones

Attached if you if you butchered it yourself from a whole chicken you probably don’t have that and that’s usually what I like to do with in this case because I’m making the video and I just needed the parts that I actually went out and bought chicken quarters that were butchered but there’s somebody

Else but usually you’re really your best bad just always buy whole chickens and do the work yourself you get much better results in met refresh your chicken but that being beside the point so we’re going to make sure we remove all the bits of rib here now we’ve got

To preserve this chicken skin and unlike the duck skin which is a real pain to scrape free of meat chicken is a breeze you just pass your your fingers under it it practically practically comes away with no effort at all especially compared to the duck skin and just work

This back you might be a little bit gentle you don’t don’t rip it but you want to make sure that you keep the skin in in one whole piece and we’re going to turn our attention on the other side here to this bone that runs along here

And you’re just going to dig your fingers in just brute force dig it in get underneath the bone and free it a little bit from the meat you can slide your knife in oh my god is this so much easier than duck or what after having done a few of these ducks

Recently I can tell you this is quite a pleasure okay now get this back hey work it back can’t break the bone off so much easier there’s that and we’re going to we’re going to keep working our way back it’s ticking it’s a soft and tender you

Practically even need a knife to do this okay and you keep working it down until it got all the skin isn’t one in here completely in one piece and if you’ve got the bone and got this little splinter bone here that runs off of it then you’re gonna have to take a knife

And get rid of that damn thing because it’s that’s the bone that will give you sharp poking the gums in Chinese this thing later to make sure you’ve gotten rid of it feel it around okay now this skin then the main bone gets wrapped up a little bit so it’s

Going to get shut off to the side we got to pick through this meat a little bit make sure we didn’t leave any tendons and in fact there’s one there’s one right there they’d get rid of all that and and then we move on to the other leg start all over again

Have the skin and leg bones that have been scraped clean of me those are going to be stored in a refrigerator now I’m good at the vegetables that we kept it earlier these are going to be scraped down into the mixture and then an egg

Yolk the rule of thumb is use one egg yolk for every two legs and now that little dash of cayenne pepper and we’re grasses up to smooth paste the horse meat stuffing that is going to be using just a little bit so then I cover it up

With some cling film refrigerated for an hour or so to make it easier to work with if you’re an expert or you’re desperate you can you can just work with it right now but it will be more difficult because it will be running all over your hands where you’re trying to

Seal it up you know you can I’ve certainly done it in emergencies many times myself but it’s easier to refrigerate it this has been chilling now for movement over an hour then we have the chicken bones and just like with a duck key here to do a hint is to

Stretch it out over your hands try not to think about it you want to cover that your hand with with the skin and have a bone sticking up in your in your fist like this then you’re going to take the filling and you’re not going to get half

Of this filling in in this you’re going to get less than half and you just have to accept that what you do with the rest of the filling make a couple raviolis a good thing to do and conserve serve the ravioli along with the chicken can but

You’re going to get a lot of the filling in there okay and exactly how much you grab and mostly gonna be a matter of practice you’re just gonna have to do it a few times before you you get a good feel for how much filling to stick in

This thing unlike the duck this skin can overlap in fact it helps that seal helps it look better the duck you can’t do that because the duck skin is so fatty and so thick that if you have it overlap it’s going to be tough as hell and chewy and greasy and

Everything you don’t want duck to be but with chicken chicken skins nice and thin and when it cooks out it cooks even thinner and even better so okay now once you get a packet like this arranged and the edges are basically I’ll seal them right it’s not too big a deal it’s

Pretty easy and you’re going to put it down on the plastic seam side down and kind of clean it up a little bit in and start wrap wrap it up gently at first don’t try to squeeze it really hard on the first one just going to wrap it up

Nice be kind to it and then we will put another layer of plastic over the top of this and when we get down to the foil layer then we can then we could squeeze it more but right now we’re just trying it to get the shape that we want and

Here we come with the next layer of plastic over the top it squeeze this in together twisting the ends up now I’m going to wrap this up with foil over the top of that you don’t need to squeeze it real hard it’ll be will be flying the grill with some foil

That’s difficult at all really looks nice when you’re done but that’s that difficult okay yeah I’m squeezing that if there’s the bone in here and squeezing it a little bit at the bottom this is to shape it a little bit this is what I ended up with they get two

Packages wrapped you can see the seam side when we put these in the steam is the seam side goes down always and about this much over for filling is this just enough for about two good-sized ravioli good steam filling we’ll take this lid and start the day

Later when you unwrap this you forget this little nub here you still have to take off but now that it’s been esteemed it’s going to be real easy to take it off it’s very difficult to get this part off before great a little bit indigo Queen into the bone

Deep fryer is hot ravioli these are the chicken legs that satin refrigerator exposed overnight actually booked one overnight so the skin is nice and dry just listen you also look for my cocktail book cocktails of the South Pacific and Beyond advanced mixology available through Amazon online