Copycat Panera Bread Company Souffles

This recipe has been kicking around the internet for a few years. I've made it twice now. The first time without as much success as the second, but I'll help you avoid my mistakes.

You can get the recipe nice and legally from this ABC newscast link as this is Todd Wilbur's copyrighted work. The first time I thought the microwaving of the scrambled eggs seemed needlessly tedious and slow and so I did the par scramble in a frying pan. That came out dense and less appealing than anything with the name souffle.

The key step is the microwaving and stirring in between bursts. It does give the eggs the structure and lift to pull this off.  Like so many home cooks, I felt it was OK to change the recipe for my convenience but there are risks to that attitude with this dish.

I happened to just use some sausage and cheese this time, as that's what was waiting to be used up. I'm not totally cured of changing recipes. That change was a safe substitution.  

If you follow his recipe, you're stuck in making this recipe in multiples of four because that's what the tube crescent dough supplies. Any extra souffles will freeze well if you let them cool first and then wrap them tightly. Reheat in an oven or toaster oven. A microwave would work too, but will give you a soggier bread crust.

I'm thinking next time I'll try it with Pepperidge Farms puff pastry from the freezer case. I think that will give an even better texture to the crust and still be easy to do.

Towards a Theory of Chinese Marinades: Part I

This a topic I'll Likely revisit, thus the numbering. 

Executive Summary:

This is a long entry, so you might like an early summary. Balanced seasoning of salt and sweet through either salt/soy and wine/sugar with other aromatics representative of the chef.

Most stir fries marinate the protein in at least some soy sauce and rice wine, usually in equal parts. While reading Ken Hom's  Top 100 Stir-Fry Recipes, I noticed that he'd vary his marinades by a teaspoon of soy or rice wine now and then, and he used sesame oil in a lesser amount quite often as well.  And I wanted to understand why. 

That started me going back through some of my favorite Chinese cookbooks and looking carefully at the recipes and thinking about their construction. All this an effort to make my Chinese cooking more intuitive and flexible. But it's been educational as well.  This first entry then catalogs the authors I refer to most frequently and includes an effort to distill their basic marinating practices.


Ken Hom
 I don't actually own any of his cookbooks, though I've read most of them, and have been reading a few of his newer ones from the library recently. I did quite like his recent Complete Chinese Cookbook and have been waiting for the price to drop before I add it to my collection. 

If I were to characterize Ken Hom's marinade, for 8 oz of protein, it would be:
1 Tablespoon light soy
1 Tablespoon rice wine
2 teaspoon sesame oil
2 teaspoon corn starch 

He tends to reduce the wine by a teaspoon if the dish has a more pronounced earthy flavor, such as from dark soy, peanuts or with lamb or mushrooms as the main ingredient. If he's going to pass through oil or deep fry the protein, it's usually just egg white, sesame oil and corn starch. He'll reduce soy and the wine even more if seasoning with citrus flavors in the sauce as in his Quick Orange and Lemon Chicken which doesn't use a battered chicken. Apparently to not compete with the citrus flavors.


Martin Yan
Martin Yan can be pretty varied in his marinades, but his most consistent ingredients are soy, wine and cornstarch, heavier on the cornstarch than most. Ginger is probably his most frequent aromatic to add to a marinade, but oyster sauce appears a surprising amount as well.

1 Tablespoon soy, could be light, or dark, or even a T of each.
1-2 Tablespoon rice wine
1 Tablespoon corn starch


Yan-Kit So
She constructs more complex marinades, tends to marinate longer  and with a twist on adding the oils for the last half or third of marination time. I think it's interesting that she breaks with the equal parts of soy and shao hsing wine and also the addition of plain vegetable oil in combination with the sesame oil.

If I average her most commonly used ingredients, then this is her marinade for 8 oz of protein. Marinate 1 - 2 hours in the refrigerator; combine the oils and stir in for the last hour.

1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 Tablespoon light soy
2 t shao hsing wine
1/4 teaspoon black pepper (8 grinds is her usual specification)
1 1/2 teaspoon corn starch
1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
1 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

I did learn some interesting things from her about ginger and alcohol in marinades with a little help from the people at Cheftalk. 

And Fuschia Dunlop lists Yan-Kit So as one of her more important influences.


Nina Simonds
As with the others, there's a fair bit of variation customized to the recipe at hand, but I'll delve more into how marinades reflec the ingredients in another posting.

1 Tablespoon light soy
2 teaspoons shao hsing
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

That forms her baseline. 2 t water, 2 t corn starch make enough appearances for an mentioning but not enough to be part of the baseline. Aromatics like ginger, garlic, and green onion are more likely to appear in her marinades than anyone else.


Eileen Yin Fei Lo
I cannot construct an averaged marinade for her. She's too varied in her marination practices and is prone to include some western ingredients as substitutes for hard to find Chinese wines and spirits.  She does use oyster sauce in marinades more often than most. Martin Yan is probably the other frequent user of oyster sauce.  She'll likely get her own Marinade topic after I spend more time trying to figure out what she's up to.  There's a lot of depth to her knowledge and experience.

However, from perhaps her simplest cookbook My Grandmother's Chinese Kitchen, I think there is a baseline marinade that can be extracted and looks like this:

1 Tablespoon light soy
1 Tablespoon shao hsing
1 Tablespoon oyster sauce
1 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon salt 
1 teaspoon sugar 
pinch white pepper
2 teaspoon cornstarch

The recipes in this particular book reflect what she ate growing up and in learning to cook. So there is less meat marination going on to draw this baseline from than in her other books. But it does exhibit the kinds of flavors she grew up on. And I think this book is quite an enjoyable read in its own right for her life story.


Barbara Tropp
1 Tablespoon light soy
1 Tablespoon shao hsing wine
1 1/2 teaspoons corn starch
pinch of sugar

Like Nina Simonds, Barbara Tropp is prone to include garlic, ginger, green onion as well as hoisin, but she also exhibits a tweak where she'll skip soy and use salt or skip wine and use sugar.


Grace Young
Most of Grace Young's cookbooks compile recipes from other cooks, but The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen does capture much of her family cooking. I think there are really interesting parallels between this book and Eileen Yin Fei Lo's My  Grandmother's Kitchen. Both tell the tale of growing up Chinese and eating Chinese food and learning to appreciate it. But Grace Young grew up in San Francisco and in a more recent time. But what they share is surprising. Both are filled with good tales of family, food and life. Read them together, it's a good experience. Both have very few stir fried protein dishes too showing that how we eat in the west at Chinese restaurants is not so much how Chinese really eat.

1 Tablespoon light soy
1 Tablespoon shao hsing wine
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar 
pinch of pepper

Cornstarch does make an appearance in her marinades, but not as often as with other authors. 


Kenneth Lo
Most of his cookbooks are out of print but worth seeking out. Grace Young uses him for recipes in a few of her books.  I want to mention 3 in particular. 

Step by Step Guide to Chinese Cooking  This is from 1974 and expects that about the most authentic ingredient you'll be able to find is soy sauce. The cooking is quite different from what we'd expect today but is still respectful to the cuisine within the limits of what was available. So the recipes are carefully chosen to use only simple widely available seasonings. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing is the use of Chicken Bouillon cubes as a seasoning, something referred to as Chicken MSG in the restaurant trade of the time.  It's surprising what he pulls of in this short cookbook.

Chinese Regional Cooking from 1979 seems to be written to preserve hotel and restaurant cooking from all over China of the time as well as from regional archives. Very different recipes from what you're used to seeing in contemporary cookbooks but they work pretty well. This was written at the time that China was switching to the current form of pinyin but Lo chose to use the more familiar terms of the time. So Peking instead of Beijing and that sort of thing.

New Chinese Cooking School is from the mid 1980s but full of good color photographs and well written recipes. Barbara Tropp is still tops at teaching technique, but the pictures here and the recipes are better than Barbara's.

He's difficult to pin down on a seasoning marinade which he uses only rarely.  He uses velveting techniques a lot so there's a lot of cornstarch and egg white marinades. Also a fair bit of rubbing meat with salt and ginger, which is then paired with the egg white and cornstarch in different ways. 


Fuschia Dunlop
She  writes detailed well-researched cookbooks and has been very regionally focused in what little she's published so far.

Wine and salt comprise the most common marinade, though usually something else is also included. Ginger and green onion probably most often, but cornstarch is pretty common too. Not much soy in the marinades here. 

1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons shao hsing wine

1 1/2 inch piece of ginger lightly crushed
3 scallions, white parts only, light crushed

Part 2
Part 3 
Part 4

Rice Paper Bowls

While browsing through one of the local Asian grocers today, I saw something new. A specialized bowl for soaking rice papers. I thought it was a pretty slick idea to simplify the process, not use so much water and so on. Most have a rack or slot on the back to hold dry papers, but I think that's asking for trouble. I'd probably drip or spill some water into them. 

No pictures of my own yet, but Amazon has a few different ones that illustrate the idea.  In no particular order:

•  Mr. Spring Roll Rice Paper Water Bowl 
• Another Mr Spring Roll of a slightly different style (no palm tree)
• New Star International has them in different colors: Yellow (though they call it lime green?), Clear, Blue

Check your local stores if this looks like something you'ld like. They were cheaper than Amazon in my case.

Cheese Souffle

Cheese souffle may sound daunting and while it my have more steps, nothing is difficult to do. 

2 cups bechamel sauce
6 eggs, yolks and whites separated
1 1/2 -2 cups sharp cheese or blend of cheeses
butter
grated parmesan

Starting with the bechamel sauce.
3 tablespoons butter 
4 tablespoons flour
2 cups milk
salt and pepper to taste
pinch of ground nutmeg

Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat. 

When the foaming stops, whisk in the flour and stir to form a roux. 

 Cook the roux, for a minute, stirring the whole time. This cooks out the raw flour taste. 

Add the milk and keep whisking, raising the heat until the sauce thickens or just until it boils which. It's at its thickest just before boiling, but you won't hurt anything if it comes to a boil. Season to taste, remembering you'll be adding cheese and eggs.  Melt the cheese into the sauce and set aside to cool.

Heat the oven to 375 and set the rack to the middle of the oven.

Rub the inside of individual six 8 oz ramekins with butter. Add about a tablespoon of grated parmesan to the ramekin and tilt the ramekin so that the parmesan sticks to the butter. Pour the excess parmesan into  next ramekin and repeat adding more grated parmesan as needed.

Confession, I had my daughter do this step and she used cheddar on my microplane grater. This doesn't work as well for coating the ramekins but it still made a pretty good souffle. And she'll remember the parmesan next time.  Arrange the ramekins on a baking sheet.

Separate the eggs. If you're new to separating eggs, it's wise to separate into a bowl one egg at a time. So if you get some yolk in the white, it only messes up one egg white, not all of them. Discard that one and try again.

 Don't worry if you break one or more yolks. It's just fine.

In a metal bowl, beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. Plastic bowls tend to have a light oil film which inhibits the whites from whipping as nice or as high. Glass bowls are fine to use too.

Beat the yolks. If the cheese sauce is still hot, you'll have to temper the yolks so they don't cook as you combine them with the cheese sauce. Temper the yolks by adding small amounts of the cheese sauce to the eggs while you mix. Continue until you've doubled the volume of the yolk mixture, then add the rest of the sauce and yolk mix and stir to combine. If the cheese sauce is just warm, you can just stir the yolks right into the sauce. 

I just picked up some of the hot cheese sauce on the whisk and whisked to start tempering the yolks. 
 

  

 Need a bigger bowl. Didn't think ahead on that one. Continue adding cheese sauce in small amounts and whisking.

 

 

And then you're done combining the yolks and sauce.

Fold half the whites into the yolk and cheese mixture. This lightens the mix and makes it easier to fold in the last half of the whites with the least loss of volume.

 

  

Then repeat with the last half of the yolk mixture. Don't stir or whisk as you'll deflate your whites. Don't worry if the final souffle batter is not perfectly mixed. A few white splotches in the batter is better than deflated whites. 

 All mixed up and ready to pour into the ramekins. Notice there are still swirls of lighter and darker areas. No need to overmix.

Pour the batter eveinly into the prepare ramekins. As I'm cooking for five not six, I'm using a larger ramekin and will cook it slightly longer.

Bake for 20-25 minutes. They'll still have some jiggle. Below they're all finished. Notice they rose about 2 1/2 inches.

  
Serve immediately. They deflate quickly.

 

Went a hair too long so it's a bit darker on top than is ideal, but still a very good souffle.

The ratios in a souffle are actually fairly easy to adapt up and down for different servings.  1 egg, 1/4 cup bechamel 1/4 cup cheese and you're there for a single souffle.

A Rice Bowl with Vietnamese Flavors

This is not an authentic or traditional dish. Rather, it uses good technique and flavors to get to the final product.  I created this dish because it embodied flavors I was in the mood for and used up things I had on hand.  I decided I wanted a Rice Bowl, a bowl with rice on the bottom topped with various vegetables and meats unified by the final sauce or broth. I looked through a couple of cookbooks for ideas and concepts that resonated with my cravings and supplies. 

Big Bowl by Bruce Cost

Classic Chinese Cuisine by Nina Simonds

The Complete Vietnamese Cookbook by Ghillie Basan

The Wagamama Cookbook by Hugo Arnold

They all had dishes of interest, but Nina Simonds had a Stir-Fried Beef with Vegetables over Rice recipe on page 43 that gave me a framework and a feel for ratios that proved the most useful. She used 3 cups of stock for her sauce, but I didn't want my rice bowl to be that saucy so I made a smaller batch. Adjust sauce amounts up or down to match your preference.

I had the tail end of box of large button mushrooms (about five or six left), some green beans and about 10 oz of pork I wanted to use. 

The green beans have a longish stir fry and minced garlic and ginger tends to burn in that situation so I cut them in slices so they'd stand up to that prolonged cooking, something commonly seen in Italian cooking (minus the ginger).  The pork, I decided to go with an onion and black pepper stir fry; and the mushrooms, I would stir fry at lower heat and seasoned with oyster sauce.

1 1/2 cups long grain rice

5 or 6 large button mushrooms, sliced thinly

1 pound green beans cut into 1-2 inch pieces

1 onion, sliced julienne

10 oz pork, sliced julienne

3 tablespoons cooking oil

large handful of spinach including some mixed mesclun if you like

Pork Marinade

1 1/2 teaspoons light soy

1 1/2 teapsoons shao hsing wine

1/2 teapoon corn starch

zest of 1 lime grated finely

1/4 teaspoon dried basil, crumbled between your fingers.

Seasonings

2 inch finger thick ginger peeled  and sliced thinly (or equivalent amount of thicker ginger is fine too of course. That's just the size of the knob I used.)

4-5 cloves garlic peeled and sliced thinly

1 tablespoon soy sauce, divided (or to taste)

1 tablespoon shao hsing wine

salt

pepper

1 tablespoon oyster sauce

Sauce mixture

2 cups chicken stock

1 small star anise

1 clove

small pinch of cinnamon

2 tablespoons palm sugar or brown sugar

2-3 tablespoons fish sauce or to taste

1 1/2 tablespoon ketchup

dash of sriracha sauce to taste 

corn starch slurry to thicken to preference

juice of 1 lime

Start the rice cooking, then combine all but the last two ingredients of the sauce mix. Let that simmer along about the same amount of time the rice cooks. If you're using a rice cooker, most have longer cycles than will take for the sauce to cook. The sauce only needs about 15 minutes of cooking, which is about what the stir frying steps will take so match the timing of your rice, sauce, and stir frying.

Heat a wok over high heat until smoking. Add about a tablespoon of oil around the edges to coat the wok. Add the green beans and stir fry 2 minutes. Add half the ginger and about half of the garlic. Stir fry another 2 minutes. Add the shao hsing wine and a splash of soy sauce. Cover and let steam 1 minute, then finish stir frying to your desired doneness. The beans should have brown spots and a few black blisters.

Remove green beans to a serving bowl.

Return the wok to high heat. You shouldn't have to clean the wok as there will be no small bits or sauce stuck to the wok. Add about a tablespoon of oil around the edges to coat the wok.

Add the pork and spread out to let sear for 60-90 seconds. Meanwhile, season with some ground black pepper to taste. When the pork has picked up some sear, stir fry another minute or two and remove to a serving bowl. 

Add a little more oil to the wok if you think it needs it.  Then add the onion to the wok, and about half the remaining garlic and the rest of the ginger.  Stir fry for about 2 minutes with a splash of soy sauce and more pepper. Then add the pork back to the wok and stir fry another 60-90 seconds for the pork to pick up some of the flavor of the aromatics. 

 

Remove the pork and onions to a serving bowl.

Return the wok to the heat, add the rest of the oil and lower the temp to medium high. Your wok will have some bits from teh pork and onions, but that's OK. Just get cooking quickly before those bits burn. Add the remaining garlic, and the mushrooms. Stir fry until the mushrooms have picked up some color., about 2 minutes. Season with a little salt and pepper, and reduce the heat some more. Stir frequently, but not at the level of a true stir fry and keep cooking. The mushrooms should darken, give up liquid and shrink after a few more minutes. When the moisture has cooked off, add the oyster sauce and reduce the heat to low. 

Stir to mix and let cook slowly for a few minutes, with occasional stirring. I wanted to concentrate the mushroom flavor in the mushrooms with the sauce, not leave them crisp tender as in most stir frying.

Put the spinach in a serving bowl. 

While the mushrooms finish cooking, complete the sauce. Bring the sauce to a boil. While it's coming to the boil, remove the star anise and clove. When the sauce is boiling, thicken with the slurry to your liking. I mixed it pretty thin, just to add some body to the sauce. Then stir in the juice of 1 lime and remove from the heat. 

Everything should be done now and you're ready to eat.

Build your rice bowl in layers with rice in the bottom, the spinach leaves next, then the beans, mushrooms and top with the pork and onions. The heat from the rice and other cooked items will start wilting the spinach.

Ladle in some hot sauce to your liking, I used about 1/3-1/2 cup of the sauce, which will help the spinach cook.

My son went for the all mixed together approach to the dish.

Smoked Salmon

Perhaps more in the kippered style than what you might think of with the cold smoked nova or lox, this is a hot smoked salmon cured in salt and brown sugar.

And this is the way I like salmon best as it's just not a fish I normally enjoy eating.  I really like it this way though, particularly on a bagel with some cream cheese, red onion, and capers.

So what do I mean by cured? Curing in the general sense is a process that transforms the meat's texture and flavor while usually improving how well it keeps. Wikipedia gives a good overview of what the common  curing ingredients do.

I first started doing this with a recipe from Steve Raichlen in his excellent book How to Grill.  It turns out this identical recipe is also in the cookbook that comes with Traeger Smokers as well so I don't know who is the original author of it. But it's a pretty good recipe and simple. 

While using the same concepts, I've switched up the cooking and timing to meet my preferences. You should do the same. Try it his way, my way and then adapt to get the salmon you like best.  

I like the thinner parts and edges best over the thicker parts of the salmon. And my technique emphasizes that. I've taken to skipping the alcohol marination as I don't drink alcohol so I never have it on hand and it's not that critical to the finished dish. In the past, I've used a fruit juice soak with some added bitters and lemon juice. But where I use more pepper and more smoke, those flavors are lost anyway.

I cut the fish so there's more surface area and it's thinner so I need more of the curing mixture to cover it all than in Raichlen's version.

Phil's variation on Raichlen's theme of Smoked Salmon

3 pound fillet of salmon, skin removed

2 cups brown sugar

3/4-1 cup coarse kosher salt

3 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper

In a small mixing bowl, combine the sugar, salt, and pepper, breaking up clumps as you mix them together.  

 

Horizontally slice the thicker part of the salmon so you get a long narrow piece and the broad piece of about equal thickness.  

Spread about 1/4 of the sugar mixture on a rimmed baking sheet in a shape about the size of the fish.  Lay the salmon on the mixture. Cover with the remaining curing mix. Cover the baking sheet with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 4 hours.  

If your fridge is small, you may have to cut the fish to fit in smaller containers, but the process is the same.  

If you're smoking on a gas grill or larger smoker, you can leave the fish in long pieces. My smoker is smaller though so I need to cut up the pieces, which also works well for fitting smaller containers in the fridge. 

I'll often layer the multiple pieces of salmon in the container for curing as you'll see in the pictures.

 

After the curing time is up, the cure will have drawn out moisture from the fish, dissolving much of the salt and brown sugar. The liquid will be dark brown, from the molasses in the brown sugar. When you remove the salmon, note how it's firmer and more rigid and the color has darkened. Those are some results of the curing action. 

 About 1 1/2 hours of curing

Full Cure

Rinse off the liquid and any solid lumps of sugar and salt. But don't rinse off all the pepper. Be sure to leave the amount of pepper you want behind. 

 

Raichlen smokes his salmon at a hotter temperature than my smoker reaches so it takes about an hour to hit his level of doneness on my equipment. One time I forgot to set the timer and let it smoke for two hours and liked that even better. So I do that every time now. 

Set up your smoker and smoke the salmon at 225-250 for two hours. Alder, hickory or nut woods are my preferences for smoking salmon.

After two hours of smoking it will look something like this

Use a large spatula and carefully remove the salmon to a rack or plate to cool. It will ooze some juices and fat so if you use a rack, set it over a baking sheet or something.  The salmon will be fragile so move it carefully.

Then put in a container or zip locking baggie and refrigerate. Best served cold.

Making Stock

Stock is the flavorful liquid created from cooking the bones of an animal with aromatic herbs and vegetables in water. It's a basic ingredient in many other dishes, such as soups, stews and sauces.

Here, I'm making a turkey stock with the carcass I deboned in the earlier post, as well as photo from my Thanksgiving stock for the western style example. If I were making a chicken stock, I'd want two carcasses fro the amount of vegetables in these examples.
 

For stocks for European and American cooking the ingredients are usually:

Bones from 1 turkey carcass

2 large onion, peeled and cut in half or quarters

3-4 carrots, washed, trimmed and cut in chunks. If really thick perhaps cut them in half lengthwise too.

4 ribs celery

sprigs of thyme

2-3 bay leaves

10 pepper corns
1/2 cup white wine (optional)

Put all this in a pot. Cover with cold water. heat slowly to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Simmer for 4 hours. Strain out the solids. Chill, remove the fat when chilled. Save the fat, it's useful to cook with where you want some turkey flavor, such as in gravy. Keep the stock refrigerated and the fat too.

The wine is helpful particularly if you're working with a cooked carcass and nice with a raw carcass too.

For Chinese stocks, they change up the aromatics so the ingredients are:

Bones from 1 turkey carcass

2 large onion, peeled and cut in half or quarters

3-4 carrots, washed, trimmed and cut in chunks. If really thick perhaps cut them in half lengthwise too.

4 ribs celery

3-4 cloves garlic, crushed

4 star anise

1 inch chunk of ginger, cut in round slices, like a coin

10 pepper corns
1/2 cup ShaoHsing wine (otpional)

Put all this in a pot. Cover with cold water. heat slowly to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Simmer for 4 hours. Strain out the solids. Chill, remove the fat when chilled. Save the fat, it's useful to cook with where you want some turkey flavor, such as in gravy. Keep the stock refrigerated and the fat too.

Deboning Poultry

This was something new for me. I'd seen it done a time or two and used in various ways but I thought it looked like too much work. But my skills have improved and Turducken is something that has tempted me about this technique, so I read a few links and watched a few videos on that topic to prepare myself for actually deboning a bird myself.

Deboning a turkey is a good static walk through of the concepts. They removed the backbone which is not something everyone does.

From Youtube:

• This video, he disassembles the bird more than I was planning, but he still shows the technique pretty well.

• Turducken video,  I like this one as it shows deboning the thighs and drumsticks while attached which was how I was thinking about doing this. You also get to see the technique as applied to three different birds. 

You need a medium sized sharp knife, 5-7 inches in length. A Boning knife is the specialty knife for this task and the flexible type rather than the stiff one would be my preference. But a utility or petty knife will do the job too. I used a 6 inch petty.   
As I was thinking about using some of the skin as a casing for a stuffed dish, I left the back bone intact to maximize the skin available. In hindsight, removing the backbone simplifies things overall and there's plenty of skin for what I had in mind. 

Start the cuts along the backbone. Cut in, when you contact the bone structure, keep the knife pressed against the bone and cut in shallow strokes against the bone, freeing the meat. Being right handed. I chose to work the right side first.

Soon, you'll encounter the hip joint. Cutting out the backbone eliminates the need to free this joint. Live and learn. Once you've cut around the joint as much as possible, you should be able to pop it free.

Continue following the bone carcass around the bird until you come to where the keel bone is attached to the skin.

Repeat the same steps on the other side of the bird. Now carefully pull and cut along the connection of the keel to the skin. You've deboned most of the bird. Trim off any meaty bits if you have a plan for them as I did. Otherwise, you can leave them on to flavor the stock.

Here, the core skeletal structure is removed and set in the bowl on the left. The legs and wings are still attached with their bones.

I removed the legs and wings.

The Breast intact and trimmed.

And I rolled the breast too, debating how I should cook it. It looks more bird-like rolled.

Then I loosened the skin off the thigh, which was easy to do. Then, I pulled the skin down the drumstick as far as I could. At which point I cut it off. Then proceed as in the videos to debone the legs.  Make a cut along the thigh meat to expose the bone. Then follow the bone, cutting to free the meat. Same for the drumstick. You can see the skin above the leg, which is opened up. Note that the drumstick skin forms a seamless tube.

My plan was to grind the leg meat along with the meat bits from the carcass. Which means removing the tendons in the lower legs. This proved to be a hassle, which I suppose is why its rarely done. You see boneless skinless thighs in stores because it's pretty easy. But you don't see boneless skinless drumsticks because it's hard.   Repeat for the other leg.  


The wings, I trimmed off to maximize skin coverage on the breast meat. I figured they would be too much hassle to debone as well so they went into the stock as is.

I plan to use the ground meat for a potsticker type dumpling and to do something like this with the leg skin and forcemeat.