Should I Cut the Fat Off My Chicken Thighs?

We’re happy to have Cameron Treu, owner of Bam Bam’s BBQ in Orem, Utah, on the ThermoWorks blog today. Cameron is a competitive pitmaster. We love eating anything from his restaurant and he loves using our thermometers, so we thought we’d have a chat with him and let you in on some of his secrets.

In this post, Bam Bam shared his secrets for making BBQ chicken thighs that win awards. He also showed us two other ways to prepare them and talked about how he uses his Thermapen® to make sure they are cooked just right no matter what method he uses.

Bam Bam talked with us about the importance of getting the chicken right in barbecue competitions. “Chicken is the fastest cook and the first turn-in time,” he says. And that means that it can be a big stressor towards the end of the competition. Chicken thighs, though used far more than breasts, have some inherent challenges that you have to overcome if you want to win.

“Competition BBQ is about one bite,” Bam Bam says. The judges have a lot to eat and aren’t going to take more than one bite from each tray, so you have only one bite to get the best score from each judge. However, chicken thighs have a lot of extra fat that you don’t like on the meat, as well as some grisly bits and skin that can be bumpy and chewy.

Compound these anatomical difficulties with some pretty narrow temperature margins, and you have a meat that can baffle even the best pitmasters.

(Why chicken thigh? The dark and the light meat in chicken cook in fundamentally different ways. Light meat is lean and naturally tender, while the dark meat of the wings, legs, and thighs is fattier and more full of connective tissue—especially collagen. That’s why it can be so difficult to hit the sweet spot between rubbery and dry.)

How to trim chicken for BBQ gold

To get best results with chicken thighs, you need to trim them.

Bam Bam describes 3 levels of trimming, depending on how much effort you want to put in and how perfect you want the results to be. He calls them after different people and the *ahem* esteem given to each person.

• The Mother-in-law level is the easiest and requires the least work to make good chicken.
• When you’re neighbors, you have to put in a little more work and be more careful.
• New Girlfriend/Boss gets the most show-off effort. This is the level that Bam Bam wins at events.

Let’s examine them each in turn.

The Mother-in-law preparation is simple: apply rub to the bottom of the thigh, turn it over and apply it to the skin on the top side. Then grab the corners of the meat and skin that lay flabbily on the table. Fold the skin under the thigh, trying to leave no prints in the rub. Quickly trim any loose bits off, if you like. Putting the skin under the meat makes the piece more even, which helps it cook better. It’s quick, easy, and won’t win any awards, but it looks nice.

If you want to create a more impressive chicken thigh—perhaps for a neighborhood cookout—but you don’t wave the time to apply the full competition prep to every thigh, Bam Bam recommends taking things a step or two further than for the Mother-in-law.

First, he says, pull the skin as far off the thigh as you can. It will stick along a seam of fat, so slice through that seam gently with a sharp knife to free the skin completely. With the skin removed, “cut anything off the meat itself that you aren’t going to eat,” he says.

Bam Bam trims off the fatty bits that cling to the meat. With the short length of this cook, he says, you won’t be rendering any blobs like that.

After cutting off those pieces, lay the joint out on the cutting board and cut off any meat that goes past the knuckle of the leg bone. For a better look, square off the edge of the meat.

The skin also gets a little more treatment in the Neighbor trim: Spread it out and, with your knife at a nearly flat angle, trim any high spots off of the fatty side by keeping the blade moving and letting the edge to the work so you don’t tear the skin. Cut it so that it is uniform and squared off on all sides. You don’t want to cut too much of the skin off, though. Bam Bam warns that the skin will shrink during cooking, so you want enough to be left that you can rewrap the chicken with a little bit of overlap on the bottom side.

Before rewrapping, you need to season the meat. Season both sides of the meat with a good rub.

Bam Bam uses this step as an opportunity to layer flavors by using more than one rub—one on the meat and another on the skin. “Keep it simple though,” he says. “Make sure the rubs you use work together. A lot of guys do too much fiddling with it. ” If using a sweet rub, Bam Bam recommends layering it under the skin to minimize the risk of burning the sugars.

Once the meat is seasoned, wrap the thigh in skin, tuckingit together on the bottom. “Some guys use toothpicks to hold it together,” hesays. “Some guys even use meat glue”—his eyes roll and he scoffs—“but the day Ineed to use meat glue to compete, I’m done. ” He simply lets the skin adhere tothe meat, knowing there will be some shrinkage.

Trim away the extra skin so that when it is re-wrapped onto the meat there is enough to cover the edible portion and overlap just a little bit. With the skin in place, season the piece lightly again, being careful to avoid smudging the rub.

This method gives you uniform, nice, even chicken with nogristly bits to interrupt your enjoyment. Certainly something you’d be proud toserve your neighbors. But there is yet one more level of chicken BBQ perfectionto achieve….

Competition trim starts like the neighbor trim by removing the skin completely from the thigh. When getting ready for a competition, Bam Bam stresses that this piece of skin doesn’t have to go back on this thigh just because it came from there. A small thigh might have too much skin, but a large thigh might not have enough. You can trade skins around to fix this.

With the skins removed, Bam Bam’s next move is to “knockdown the high spots” with his knife laid almost perfectly flat against theskin. You need a very sharp knife to avoid tearing the tender skin, he says. Hepoints out that chicken skin itselfis quite translucent, letting a good deal of light through. If your skin isquite opaque then it has a lot of fat on it. Bam Bam does not recommendscraping all of that fat off, only the high spots, but he has a trick forgetting crisp, un-flabby skin that we’ll come to later.

Once the skins are taken care of, trim the meat. Remove the same fatty and gristly bits that we removed for the Neighbor cut, and square off the meat along the sides. If there are any obvious veins in the meat, trim them out with a sharp knife, and inspect the chicken for anything that could be seen as interrupting a ‘perfect’ bite.

To make a more uniform piece, and to make pieces that aresmall enough to fit six to a box for the judges, Bam Bam cuts the knuckle ofthe thigh bone off. “Find this little line of fat,” he says, and cut theknuckle off along that line. “Some guys use garden shears, me, I just…” (atthis point Bam Bam placed the knife edge where he wanted to cut the bone, andpounded the spine with his other hand, popping the knuckle clean off.)

While preparing the thighs for actual cooking, Bam Bamtalked a little bit about competitions and judging. Emphasizing the “one-bite” judging thathappens, he holds up a thigh, demonstrating that there is a meatier side of thebone and a less meaty side. “I’ll put that side facing the judges,” he says.Most people, he says, just pick it up and take a bite without turning it aroundor anything, so that first bite can be improved by positioning it correctly inthe turn-in box.

To make sure the very best chicken gets turned in, he says that he’ll cook 10–12 thighs if six are to be turned in. That way the best looking, best-done pieces can be used. But, he says, “if it’s cooked right and tastes good, you’re gonna beat 80% of the competition … taste is the biggest score” on the scorecard.

To season the pieces, Bam Bam will hold each piece in one hand while sprinkling rub with the other, moving both around to get even, light coverage. He then wraps the thighs in skin and seasons them again in the same way, being extra careful not to smudge the rub.

The result is a rectangular, compact, completely uniform piece of chicken that is going to cook evenly and present nothing but perfection on the first bite. The competition style is the most compact, the most even

How to Trim the Fat from Chicken Thighs