Why remove the skin at all
The usual chicken-leg question is how to get the skin crispy. Cooking With Ry takes the opposite route in this video and makes that the whole point: if the skin is the part causing trouble, remove it and stop chasing it. That is the clean answer the cook is built around. Instead of trying to force chicken skin into a texture he does not really want, he focuses on what the meat already does well.
That approach makes sense here because he is working with drumsticks, which he treats as dark meat that already carries a lot of moisture and flavor. He does not present skinless chicken as a compromise or a novelty stunt. He presents it as a simple way to avoid rubbery skin and still end up with chicken that tastes like barbecue.
He also makes room for a broader point: you do not need to turn every chicken cook into a trim job. There is no obsession with perfect shaping, no long detour through tendon removal, and no attempt to make the legs look fancier than they are. The idea is to keep the process easy enough that the flavor work matters more than the cosmetic work.
How the cook is set up
Ry preps the drumsticks ahead of time, though he is clear that the same idea could happen the day of the cook if needed. In his version, the legs get coated with West Coast Barbecue Company Tailgate Blend and then go on a rack in the refrigerator overnight. That rest period is doing the kind of work he wants from it: letting the seasoning settle into the meat before the chicken ever reaches the grill.
The rack matters too. He places the legs so they are not sitting in their own juices, and he is not fussed if they touch a little. This is the kind of practical setup that fits the rest of the video: enough organization to make the cook easier, not so much that it becomes fussy.
The grill itself is a Weber Kettle loaded with briquettes in a Vortex. Ry says he is not chasing a precise temperature at first; he expects the cook to land somewhere around 300 to 350 degrees. That’s a useful detail because it shows the point of the cook: he is not trying to engineer a brittle skin finish or an overly managed chamber. He is just cooking chicken legs over charcoal and letting the setup work.
He adds apple wood for smoke and keeps the lid on until it is time to check progress. That combination—simple charcoal, a little fruit wood, and a seasoned dark-meat cut—is the backbone of the whole video.
What changes once the legs hit the kettle
Once the chicken is on, the focus shifts from appearance to timing. Ry checks in after about 45 minutes and uses internal temperature as the guide for the next move. He is not trying to sauce too early. In his words, if the legs were still down around the 120s or 130s, he would want to wait. But in this cook they are already there, so he moves to the sauce step.
That sequence tells you a lot about how he thinks the cook should work. The seasoning is not meant to be the only flavor. The smoke is not meant to dominate. The chicken is meant to build layers: rub first, then charcoal and apple wood, then sauce near the end.
He also avoids turning the legs over just to chase grill marks. He says plainly that he is not looking for them. That choice fits the rest of the video’s logic. If the goal is flavor and tenderness on skinless chicken, the surface pattern is secondary. The leg can keep the marks it gets.
After saucing, the chicken goes back on and keeps cooking until it is ready. Ry checks again around 20 minutes later and sees the legs close to the finish line. A final check pushes them into the range he wants, with one leg reading higher than the others. He treats that as fine, because these can go high without becoming a problem in the same way a leaner cut might.
When the sauce goes on
The sauce step is one of the more distinctive parts of the cook because Ry does not just brush it on and move along. He dips each leg into the sauce, spins it for full coverage, and then brushes the top. It is a simple move, but it gives the finished chicken a more deliberate outside layer.
He uses a barbecue sauce from Somerset Farms, picked up at a farm stand near Los Olivos he likes to visit. The exact flavor profile is not the point of the video; the method is. He is showing that this kind of cook works with a sauce you already enjoy, not one specific brand or style that needs to dominate the result.
The sauce also helps explain why he is not worried about perfect skin texture. Without skin in the way, the rub and sauce sit directly on the meat. That means the chicken can absorb more of what he puts on it, and the final bite has a clear path from seasoning to smoke to glaze.
What the finished bite tells you
After a short rest, Ry cuts in and pulls the meat apart enough to show how juicy it is. That visual check matters because it answers the obvious concern: if you remove the skin, are you giving up too much? His answer is no. The dark meat still has enough built-in moisture that the cook stays satisfying, and the seasoning has a direct route into the meat itself.
The real case for this method is not that it replaces skin-on chicken. It does not. Ry still says he loves crispy skin when that is the goal. But for a straightforward grilled chicken leg, skinless drumsticks give him a simpler path to the outcome he wants: tender meat, pronounced rub flavor, smoke from the kettle, and sauce on the finish.
That is why the video works as a technique piece rather than just a one-off experiment. It shows a way to stop fighting the skin question and move straight to the meat question. If the goal is a clean barbecue drumstick with plenty of flavor and none of the rubbery-skin worry, this is a convincing approach.
The practical takeaway
The main lesson is not complicated. Skinless chicken drumsticks can work very well on charcoal when the cook is built around the meat instead of the skin. Ry seasons ahead of time, cooks over a Weber Kettle with apple wood, sauces late, and finishes the legs to a dark-meat-ready temperature. The result looks like something that belongs on a grill plate, not a workaround.
That is the appeal here: less fiddling, more flavor, and a clear reason for every step. If you have ever skipped chicken legs because the skin felt like one more thing to manage, this cook gives you another route.
Watch the original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW9OJVvD1dc
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Fire. Smoke. Flavor.
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