I tried out this recipe one weekend when we had a bad snowstorm and I had to make do with what I had on hand, which included some boneless chicken thighs. I’ve written about this item before and will say again: stop buying boneless chicken breasts and buy these instead. They are so much better and cost so much less. They are every bit as good as white meat and they don’t dry out. If you think your family won’t eat them, just serve them up and don’t say anything. I can (almost) guarantee that no one will know the difference except to say, ‘Hey Mom/Honey, these are really great!”
Anyway, at some point during the weekend I watched an episode of Sara’s Weeknight Meals with cook Sara Moulton, whom I truly like and admire. She was doing an episode in which she made a baked chicken recipe that called for only five ingredients and was supposed to be ridiculously easy. And yet she added a whole lot of work to it. I can’t blame her, especially. This particular recipe is all over the place and the ones I’ve checked have all have you make it the same labor-intensive way. (I first ran across this recipe in a book by Judith Viorst called Murdering Mr. Monti. You’ll notice that I’m not linking it to the Amazon page as I usually do with books I mention in my posts, as it’s not really worth reading. I read it back in my I’ll-read-almost-anything-if-it’s-a-mystery days. But you should read her other books, including the one I have in the downstairs bathroom, Alexander and the the Wonderful, Marvelous, Excellent, Terrific Ninety Days.)
Sara agrees with me about chicken thighs, by the way, saying in one of her recipe posts, “Chicken thighs should be more popular. The meat is much more flavorful than the white meat and almost always cooks up moist, which is not something you can say of chicken breast meat.” Her version of this recipe called for bone-in, skin-on chicken parts, but I knew they’d be great made with the boneless thighs I had. So I thought, ‘We can have that for dinner, and I can make them a much easier way.’ And so I did. The three of us scarfed down the whole batch.
What’s so labor intensive about the original? The biggest source of the unnecessary work comes from all the different pans/bowls you’re told to use. First, you’re supposed to melt the butter in a saucepan on the stove. So silly! You’ve now messed up a whole pan. Then you’re told to pour the melted butter into a bowl and mix it with the garlic, yet another messed-up container. (And we keep being told to smash/mince our garlic, which I refuse to do. Why do you think garlic presses were invented? No garlicky hands or cutting board when you use it!) Then you have to mix the breadcrumbs and the Parmesan together in yet another bowl. And then you bake the chicken on a baking sheet. If you’re keeping track, the recipe has you use four different items. I was determined to come up with a technique that had you do all the prep with a cutting board and knife and everything else in the baking dish you use to cook the chicken. It has never been clear to me with this recipe how much crumb coating would actually stick to the chicken, since it doesn’t have you do the usual dip-in-flour/dip-in-egg scenario–not that I want to do that, believe me. So just figure that you’ll have a fair amount of browned, crispy, garlicky breadcrumbs that aren’t part of the chicken itself and will therefore be good sprinkled over whatever vegetable you serve with this. (Although, frankly, I just ate them on their own.)
That’s a lot of commentary for this very simple recipe, and, as you’ll see below, I have plenty of other commentary as well. It’ll probably take you longer to read all this than it will fake you to actually make the recipe, but I hope that you’ll be pleased enough with the results that it can become something you keep in your back pocket for the nights when you need something quick, easy and delicious.
Really Easy Garlic Baked Chicken
This is my much-simplified version of a recipe that's all over the place and has way too many steps and uses way too many bowls/pans. I've done my best to revise it so that all prep and baking is done in the baking utensil itself, unless you need to do some trimming of the chicken parts.
Ingredients
- 3-4 pounds chicken preferably boneless chicken thighs or bone-in skin-on parts, or, if you really must, boneless chicken breasts (Obviously you're going to get more meat from 4 pounds of boneless chicken than from 4 pounds of bone-in parts, but you'll still have the same amount of real estate to cover with the butter and crumbs/cheese. So adjust your expectations accordingly as to how many people you can serve.)
- Salt and pepper
- 1 stick of butter The original recipe calls for 2 sticks. Folks, I'm a great fan of butter, but to call for that much for this amount of chicken is just ridiculous. Sara says that you don't want to run out of garlic butter in the middle of things and has you drizzle the leftover butter on top of the chicken after you coat it with breadcrumbs, yet another fiddly step that may end up disturbing your nice crumb coating you've just worked so hard to achieve.
- 2-3 cloves garlic pressed
- 1 cup breadcrumbs, either panko or homemade Please don't use other store-bought breadcrumbs if you can possibly help it, as they seem so stale. You can pulse up a slice or two of bread in your food processor--and if you have a mini one, so much the better, as then you don't have to mess up a whole big appliance--if you don't have panko. Does everyone know what panko is? They're Japanese-style breadcrumbs, very light and crisp. I try to keep an eye out for panko on sale at my regular grocery store or to see if it's available at Costco, and then I stock up and keep it in the freezer. It's just great to keep on hand. I know you're supposed to make any leftover bread into crumbs and freeze that, but I find that I rarely have leftover bread, and homemade breadcrumbs seem to stick together into a ball when I freeze them. And yes, you do have to freeze them! Don't refrigerate bread unless you like mold.
- 1 cup finely-grated Parmesan or Romano cheese that you grated yourself, preferably on a microplane grater since that will give you the nicest, fluffiest result
Instructions
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Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Slice the butter and spread out in a 9 x 12 or 10 x 10 glass or ceramic baking dish, then put that into the oven while it heats. The butter will melt in about five minutes. Take the pan out to cool slightly while you do the rest of the prep. Press the garlic right into the pan and mix it around.
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Meanwhile, trim any big globs of fat from your chicken. If you're using boneless chicken breasts, you really should remove the tough tendon, a task that gives you yet another reason not to use them. If you do,, though, and you want them to cook fairly quickly, put some plastic wrap over the top of the chicken pieces and pound them to a fairly even thickness. (I use my rolling pin as a pounder.) Sprinkle the chicken with salt and pepper.
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Mix the breadcrumbs into the butter and then mix in the Parmesan. (This two-step process will help make sure that the mixture is fairly cool when you mix in the cheese, as you don't want it to melt into chunks.)* Plop the chicken pieces onto the baking sheet and coat them with the butter/crumbs/cheese mixture. Press the mixture onto the chicken to get a good layer. If you have any extra crumb mixture, just pile it onto the tops of the chicken pieces.
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Bake for about 30 minutes (for boneless chicken pieces) or 45-50 minutes (for bone-in chicken). Pour any accumulated juices from the pan onto the chicken once you've placed it on a serving platter, or just serve from the baking sheet and scrape any drippings onto each serving.
Recipe Notes
*If you're using the boneless chicken parts and thus baking the dish for the shorter time, you may want to pre-toast the breadcrumbs so that you're sure they'll get brown and crispy by the time the chicken is done. Just put the breadcrumbs into the oven for 10-15 minutes, stirring them around a couple of times, before you coat the chicken with them.