Back in October, I made an attempt to cut my own dark meat from chicken and got a little frustrated. This time I took my own advice and chose to watch Jacque Pepin debone chicken Galatine Ballotine (watch this video) before I started. I watched the entire video and am still amazed. While I didn't proceed to bone out the entire chicken as Pepin demonstrated, I did use his technique on legs.
After removing the wings, breasts and tenderloins, I had two whole legs remaining from my 4.60 lb chicken.
Grabbing one of the legs by the exposed thigh bone knuckle, I scraped the flesh from the bone with a paring knife. Then I cut the meat from around the joint joining the thigh and leg bones -- the knee -- and continued on, scraping the meat from the leg bone until I was right near what I guess would be the ankle.
Pulling the flesh up away from the ankle, I whacked the bone near the ankle with the spine of my chef's knife, breaking it and freeing the two bones from the flesh. The flesh was turned rightside out before I cut through the skin and meat above the ankle. I was able to easily work the skin from the meat with my fingers.
Then I did the other whole leg, yielding two nice pieces of boneless skinless leg meat.
And weighing it, I know now that two whole chicken legs from a 4.6 pound bird only yields 11.2 ounces of meat.
As I stopped to wash my hands before each image and accept a phone call, this took me 30 minutes. Without interruption, it would easily be done in 15 minutes. With practice, I'm guessing a couple minutes.
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