How to Bake Chicken

Tom Papoutsis: Hi, I am Tom Papoutsis. Today we are doing chicken basics. We just got done doing our rub and now we are going to bake our chicken. We are actually going to use the rub that we just made in the previous clip to put on our chicken to bake our chicken.

Essentially, what I am going to do, I am going to take the chicken that we started out cutting up today, I am going to take -- now we are going to leave the skin on this chicken and I have a pizza stone here. I like using my pizza stone because things don't stick too well to it, because it's seasoned and it is very nice and black and I very carefully work with this thing to keep it nice and seasoned, so the things don't stick. But what I am going to do is I am going to arrange these chicken. I have a piece of a thigh, I have the leg and now this is actually a breast here.

Now whenever we are baking chicken the first thing we need to do is preheat our oven. I have got my oven preheated to 400 degrees. A lot of times with bone-in chicken, I like to bake it like between 350 and 400 degrees with bone-in, go about an hour on it, I figure it's going to be an hour, one way to test it is to see if it separates off the bone, but typically, to be safe you can go 350-400 for one hour with bone-in chicken, it should work.

Boneless chicken breast or boneless chicken, typically you only have to go about 30-35 minutes, 40 on the outside. So it takes less if you have -- if you do not have the bone in the chicken. I am going to take the rub and it's very easy. You can use a spoon and you can actually spoon this on. A lot of times I just take, I will take my fingers like this and I just sprinkle it on. Now it's called rub. Why do we call it a rub? Well, because what we are going to do is we are going to put that on. I am not worried about this other stuff coming out over the edge here. That's irrelevant.

What we are going to do is we are going to get this chicken coated with this rub. Get it coated real good and then I am actually going to physically rub this. Now you can see what we use, there is a lot of rub for we have got. You see how it sticks my fingers, imagine how it sticks to this chicken and I am just going to kind of pat it, rub it. If you want to, look here, this is what you can't see. I am going to show it to you. See that right there? I can flip that open, I can put a little bit of rub on the inside, I am going to pat that in. Now you have got some flavor going to the inside. You got this stuff laying here on the pan. Guess what? Flip your chicken in it, roll it around, rub it, coat it as much as you can. Get that flavor in around that chicken as much as you can.

Now before we put it in the oven, I am going to go over to the sink to wash my hands and then we are going to come back, put it in our preheated oven and after it's done, we will pull it out and we will show you the finished product.

It has been about an hour, our chicken that we put in the oven to bake it's actually done. We are ready to pull it out. So right now let's pull our chicken out of the oven. Nice, well done, crispy chicken. You can see we are really, really going here as far as the grease is concerned, that's because of the fat from the skin. I am going to go ahead and just take these and plate these up. Well, here is our breast, here is our thigh and we will get our leg out here and there we go and there is our baked chicken.

Next, we will make fried chicken.