BBQ Chicken

Well, ok, not BBQ chicken breast or legs or wings. How about BBQ chicken feet? I’ve never made these before but I absolutely love chicken feet. It’s probably for the more adventurous but they really are delicious if prepared well. There isn’t really any meat to speak of. All the nutrition comes from the skin and the cartilage and connective tissues. Like any meat with lots of connective tissue, they need to be cooked for a very long time to break down and soften these tough proteins. If cooked properly they just melt in your mouth and you just spit out the bones.

Chicken feet do need some preparation before you can cook them. You’ll notice that there are rather sharp claws on them buggers. So, the first thing one needs to do is clip them all off. Easy to do with a sharp pair of kitchen shears. Next I scrubbed them well with salt and washed them off. Then the feet were blanched for five minutes in a pot of boiling water. After that they are ready to be cooked however you like. I decided to use my pressure cooker and a sweet and sour BBQ mustard sauce. I started with about a half cup of good spicy commercial BBQ sauce. I’m partial to Famous Dave’s Devil’s Spit sauce. To this was added a few squirts of regular old yellow mustard, a sliced up onion, a few cloves of garlic, a couple tablespoons of citron marmalade and about a cup and a half of the cooking water that the feet were blanched in. The feet were added to the pot and it was cooked under pressure for about an hour and a half.

I actually made these chicken feet over two days. After cooking in the pressure cooker I put the feet, sauce and all, in the fridge to rest until the next evening. I placed the cooked feet on a baking sheet and baked them in a low 225 °F oven for about an hour until the feet were nicely warmed and the sauce sort of caramelized on them.

The feet were served atop a bed of brown rice. I reserved some of the tangy BBQ sauce and added that to the plate. I also had a side of stir fried vegetables. The chicken feet came out just as I had hoped. They tasted sweet and spicy with a hint of sourness. The bones just fell apart and the delicious broken down proteins just melted off of the bones in your mouth. I was happy and fortunately no one else would touch them so I get them all to myself!