Butterflied Drumsticks Take Grilled Chicken To The Next Level

A perfectly grilled drumstick is easily one of the tastiest pieces of poultry. The ratio of crispy skin to juicy meat is ideal, and drumsticks are just plain fun to eat with no knife, fork, or even plate required. For proof, check out your local Renaissance festival. They're also budget-friendly, at roughly half the price of chicken breasts, and kid-friendly — dare to take the last drumstick at the family barbecue and you'll incur the wrath of every child in attendance.

Unfortunately, grilled drumsticks can go wrong easily. Cooking bone-in chicken is tricky enough, but drumsticks pose an extra challenge with their irregular shape. They take forever to cook — up to an hour, and sometimes more — and by the time the thick part of the drumstick is done, the skin is burnt to a crisp and the thinner meat is shriveled and dry. Even then, your fully-cooked chicken legs may still have unappealing streaks of pink and purple around the bone, which, though not a safety concern, can certainly ruin an appetite.

Enter the butterflied drumstick, the solution to the burnt drumstick blues. By slicing the drumstick down the bone on one side and splaying out the meat, you can cut your cooking time in half and say goodbye to those icky purple splotches. Plus, butterflying the drumstick doubles the surface area for seasoning, ensuring you get consistently phenomenal flavor in every single bite, and, of course, all that crispy skin.

First, look at your drumstick. The skin on one side covers more of the meat than the skin on the opposite side. Lay the drumstick down on a stable cutting board with the side with less skin facing up. Blot it with a paper towel to remove any moisture and reduce slipping.

Next, take your knife — either a boning knife or a sharp paring knife works best — and cut through the meat down the length of the bone. Make two additional cuts on either side where the meat connects to the bone, almost like you're deboning a chicken thigh, but be careful not to cut through the meat to the cutting board or separate it from the end of the bone, as it will fall off completely.

Butterflied chicken drumsticks work great in any grilled chicken recipe, like bourbon-chile barbecue grilled chicken or char siu chicken. They cook quickly on the grill — roughly 15 minutes — so they're perfect for a weeknight dinner when you're craving chicken but don't want to spend an hour or more fussing with it. This chicken hack can save you time and bring added flavor to just about any chicken recipe, as long as it's not low and slow, because you need high heat to get that tantalizingly crispy skin. Before cooking, spread the meat out flat and season both sides — which is technically the inside and outside of the drumstick — for maximum flavor.