Oven Baked Chicken

Chicken 🐔 is a favorite meat and my go to protein when cooking. I have chicken every week and I am always trying to find new recipes, marinades and ways to cook. When it comes to chicken, I would say dark meat only, but occasionally I will have white. Only ocassionally! You may find an occasional chicken tenderloin in our house. But that’ is really only used for buffalo chicken dip, tacos or even homemade chicken tenders. We do, however, love a good chicken wing. Other than that, we are a dark meat only 🍗 household. 😂

I will try and mix it up between legs and thighs, bone-in or boneless. Sometimes I will pan fry the chicken or use the air fryer. We love the crisp but still juicy chicken that air frying gives. The only problem is, I have an air fryer that is small, too small. So I usually ended up having to do multiple batches to cook all the chicken. Who has the time (and effort) to cook multiple batches!? So my new go-to and favorite way to prepare chicken is in the oven. My secret for still getting the crisp but still juicy result… I use a bacon pan. I got our bacon pan from Target and it honestly I used way more for cooking than I expected. I would definitely recommend getting one! I find that the bacon pan helps to have the all around crisp on the chicken and it doesn’t dry it out.

Typically I will season/marinade my chicken over night or the morning of the day I am cooking. Sometimes I will season right before cooking. All depends on my mood or time I have. My favorite go to marinade is using McCormick’s Grill Mates packets, specifically the Chipotle pepper.

I set the oven to 425 for chicken legs and thighs and cook about 40-45 minutes, pending on the size of them. I will check them about halfway through to see if they need to be flipped or rotated. For wings, I set the oven to 450 and will cook them for 30 minutes. I then flip the wings and cook for an additional 20-30 minutes, again depending on the size. Lastly, for tenderloins, I set the oven to 375 and cook for about 25-30 minutes. Again checking halfway to flip or rotate them.

I would love to hear you favorite ways to prepare chicken or your favorite marinades as we are always looking for new ways to cook chicken! Leave your comments below! 👇🏽

Live to Eat,
Tiv