How to Get the Most Out of Your Chicken Legs - Wahls Paleo Plus

The esteemed Dr. Wahl talks about bone marrow and getting it into your diet regularly. Bone broth is a great way to add some serious collagen and more proteins to your diet. This is primarily spoken of in terms of beef bone marrow but I try to get marrow from anything I eat that has a bone.

Your Chicken legs are filled with marrow, and let me tell you, when those are cooked it is the easiest encased marrow to access. This is why all those stray dogs attack chicken bones, because many people have no idea how to eat them, and leave the most nutritious parts strewn on the ground.

Chicken Legs: Cooking and Eating

When it comes to chicken I always dread the length of time it takes to cook so lets talk a bit about why chicken takes so much longer to cook than beef. We have to cook it thoroughly primarily because of salmonella and the density of chicken. With beef the big issue E-coli which is found on the surface of the meat. This is why cooking ground steak thoroughly is important, ground meats are, by design, all surface area. So when we cook chicken we have to get the inside temperature to 165° which is a far cry from the 160° surface temp that beef needs to be at to be considered safe.

Chicken is not flavorless. There are a lot of things that "Taste like chicken" but if you had ever had schmaltz (Chicken Fat) you will know that not only does chicken have flavor, it is pretty amazing compared side by side with other meats. The issue is that we need to cook the damn thing thoroughly which means we lose all the flavor because the fats run out of the meat. If fat is flavor, and it is, the more you cook any meat the less flavor you are going to have because the more fats you will lose. So cooking chicken (and turkey) is an uphill battle. We have to try and keep as much of the fat as possible AND cook it thoroughly. luckily people have been cooking chicken for thousands of years and we have a few tricks the one I use is Brining, which is just soaking the Chicken in saltwater for a few hours before cooking.

Some people want to know they WHY? of things and for those of you that do I present a quote from Craig Goldwyn's Huffington Post article "Brining"

Meat proteins are complex, long and coiled. When sodium and chloride ions get into the muscles, the electrical charges mess with the proteins, especially myosin, so they can hold onto moisture more tenaciously. As a result, less is lost during cooking.

When my favorite food mag, Cook’s Illustrated did a test, they discovered that a chicken soaked in plain water and another soaked in a brine both gained about 6 percent by weight. When they cooked both ,as well as an unsoaked bird straight from the package, the chicken straight from the package lost 18 percent of its original weight, the chicken soaked in water lost 12 percent of its presoak weight, and the brined chicken lost only 7 percent of its presoaked weight. Add to that the 6 percent water gain in the brined bird, and you have a hen that is 11 percent more juicy than straight out of the package.

Best of all, according to research conducted by Dr. Greg Blonder forAmazingRibs.com, the brine and the moisture is concentrated near the surface. This counteracts one of the biggest problems of cooking. The meat on the surface is hotter and is almost always overcooked and dry by the time the center is properly cooked. The added moisture near the surface helps the area that needs the most help.

So, I hope that helps, all I know is that brining helps me keep fats in my birds and I like that, I think that is what Craig is saying here, if not my apologies.

So what all this is leading to is, not only do you have to cook chicken longer, if you want to do that well you are going to benefit from soaking it in a little salt water before hand. You do not need anything special, a lot of brines will have you adding sugar and all sort of craziness, again chicken is delicious just let it alone.

My brine is just Salt and Water, I take my largest pot put 3/4 Cup of salt in it and add water. So many of these brines got you heating the water, and that might be very helpful in areas with iffy tap water but I just add the water to my salt. It is simple and effective.

I swish the salt around so its not just a pile on the bottom of the pot and then add the chicken.

It is always best for me to plan chicken because I do not want it sitting in my refrigerator for too long and I have found that family packs of chicken legs are a lot less expensive than some breasts, I am lucky I like dark meat because breasts are just more expensive, and have less fat btw so lose/lose it seems, but to each their own. Oh, and brining will aid in your breast also, I just prefer dark meats with a bone, again this is about getting to that marrow.

After letting my legs sit in this brine for at least 4 hours I am ready to cook. You can roast these in any pyrex casserole pan easily, if you have something you like to roast in by all means roast away however you do. I use a cast iron dutch oven, I leave the skin on and do not cover my chicken. I love eating the toasted and crispy skin and I want the fat the sits right under the skin to run enough that I can use it to cook my vegetables in.

 

These are before and after shots, I could have cooked them a bit longer but the meat fell off the bone just fine and was very juicy, and please lets translate that to fatty. It is a shame that we change language so much so that we feel good about what we are doing or eating. The "Juicy-ness" of this chicken is the fat. Sure I soaked it in water and that water is now inside this bird helping the fat penetrate, and boy does it penetrate, look at this...

Here is my Chicken as I am eating it, you can see that deep down near the bone there is liquid fat, oh how juicy :)

Now this is part one of our meal because this whole post is about marrow, which is inside the bone, inside the meat of this chicken leg. If you are a cartilage eater this is going to be a simple addition to what you already do, if not, well this might be a bit more difficult for you.

Lets talk briefly about organic vs. conventional. If you are eating organic, that's great, I encourage it, but I would warn that the USDA  is probably not the best source to learning if something is really organic (I will post something about the USDA and food health one day). If, like me, you primarily eat conventional meats, you should know that is what is commonly know as a bad idea. First off there is no way that any conventional farms treat animals humanely. It is awful, there is no other way to describe it, and because we contribute to them by purchasing their food we are bad people. I am serious, there is no excuse, but I continue to do it. Eating the marrow of chickens whose lives were spent within that industry is probably, on the surface, another bad idea. There are lots of fatty toxins that are stored in the marrow and, having MS, it is probably best to avoid toxins like that. I elect to take the risk, mainly because I am on a diet that will, by design, detoxify. This by no means says it is "safe," it would be much better to only eat organic and if I were to do that I would only benefit more form everything in the bone marrow.



To access and eat the marrow we have to remove the cartilage caps and get to the fibrous ends of the leg. The shaft is going to still be pretty solid and now that it is cooked will splinter, which is why you never give dogs or cats cooked bones.

Now that you have removed the cartilage, which you can do by grabbing it with you molars and prying it off the cancellous, or spongy ends of the bone. That spongy bone, is full of bone marrow so will have a very fibrous texture. It is edible, and if you did brine your chicken this will be fatty and have a nice salty quality to it. Above you can see the bone after I have eaten the cancellous on the ends of the shaft.

Once the two ends are removed we can splinter the shaft to access the marrow, now this may not seem to be worth it for the amount of marrow you are going to get, but the nutrients in bone marrow, for me, far outweigh the work I put in to access the marrow.

Overview of nutrients found in marrow from NutritionData

Calorie Information

Amounts Per Selected Serving

%DV

Calories

206

(862 kJ)

10%

  From Carbohydrate

11.4

(47.7 kJ)

  From Fat

127

(532 kJ)

  From Protein

68.2

(286 kJ)

    

Carbohydrates

Amounts Per Selected Serving

%DV

Total Carbohydrate

1.3

g

0%

Dietary Fiber

0.1

g

0%

Starch

~0.0

g

Sugars

0.0

g

Fats & Fatty Acids

Amounts Per Selected Serving

%DV

Total Fat

14.1

g

22%

Saturated Fat

5.9

g

29%

Monounsaturated Fat

~1.1

g

Polyunsaturated Fat

~0.3

g

Total Omega-3 fatty acids

~6.8

mg

Total Omega-6 fatty acids

~282

mg

Learn more about these fatty acids
and their equivalent names

Protein & Amino Acids

Amounts Per Selected Serving

%DV

Protein

17.1

g

34%

Vitamins

Amounts Per Selected Serving

%DV

Vitamin A

~0.4

IU

~0%

Vitamin C

~1.2

mg

~2%

Vitamin E (Alpha Tocopherol)

~0.5

mg

~2%

Vitamin K

~0.3

mg

~0%

Thiamin

~0.0

mg

~1%

Riboflavin

~0.0

mg

~0%

Niacin

~0.0

mg

~0%

Vitamin B6

~0.0

mg

~2%

Folate

~0.1

mg

~0%

Vitamin B12

~0.0

mg

~0%

Pantothenic Acid

~0.0

mg

~0%

Choline

~0.9

mg

  

Minerals

Amounts Per Selected Serving

%DV

Calcium

~7.2

mg

~1%

Iron

2.0

mg

11%

Magnesium

~1.0

mg

~0%

Phosphorus

~6.1

mg

~1%

Potassium

~16.0

mg

~0%

Sodium

217

mg

9%

Zinc

~0.0

mg

~0%

Copper

~0.0

mg

~1%

Manganese

~0.1

mg

~3%

Selenium

~0.6

mg

~1%

Fluoride

~

Sterols

Amounts Per Selected Serving

%DV

Cholesterol

47.4

mg

16%

Phytosterols

~

Other

Amounts Per Selected Serving

%DV

Alcohol

~0.0

g

Water

~2.3

g

Ash

~0.1

g