Chinese Chicken Drumsticks Tutorial on Technique (Chinese Recipes)

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Step 5:

That's one side finished. Now, take the other part of the chicken wing that you set aside, and you're going to do the same thing to it, but it's a tad trickier since there are two bones in there. Feel out the 'knuckle' bit at the joint, and cut into it, but not through it.

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Step 6:

Pop it open with the wingtip and pull down, just like with the first part.

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Step 7:

Cut the tip off. You can save them if you like to make your own chicken broth. Now you want to take out the extra bone, which will be the smaller one. Push the meat down (not inside out, yet). Hold the wing by the larger bone and gently rotate the smaller one down so that it's inline, kind of like winding a clock hand from noon to 6 o'clock. Push the smaller bone up through the meat now, you should see the tip of it. Push the bone until it sticks out, then just pull that end all the way through. Sometimes you get the little ligament cap, sometimes you don't, it doesn't really matter. You should be left with a slightly smaller version of what you had with the first part.

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Step 8:

Pull the meat inside-out on it the same way as before. So, one chicken wing will yield the following:

Do that a bunch more times. You get better with time. I think the first time I made these, it took me and a friend an hour to do a whole batch (how ever many come in the large wrapped packs from Safeway, maybe 20 or 30). Now I can do a whole set in 30 minutes, by myself. You'll mess up a few of them, at first. It happens.

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Step 9:

From here, you can do any number of things with them. Slather them in a sauce and grill them for a BBQ, fry them as I'll show below, any way you cook bone-in chicken. As for why the fuss of doing this complicated cutting process, the end result looks really crazy, and since the meat is sort of piled at the bottem, rather than pulled taut over a bone from joint to joint, it's incredibly tender.

For the frying, set up your igredients. I use an equal mix of plain bread crumbs and grated parmesan cheese.