Cast Iron Oven Chicken

Cast Iron Oven Chicken is actually a recipe that I made up and shared with my mom, instead of the other way around. There is nothing more satisfying to an earnest student than being able to show your teacher something that they did not already know. It's not like my mom didn't know how to make chicken in the oven. Anyone who sets out to make chicken in an oven can find some kind of receptacle or pan and cook chicken in an oven. When it comes to doing it well, it's really about your particular tools and approach. What I love about my own oven-chicken style is how crispy the skin comes out.

To me, it was a mystery for a long time as to how to get truly crisp chicken. Then my husband and I left Brooklyn and bought a house in the suburbs, with a kitchen from 1987! The ovens work, but the top oven only has a working top coil, so it's basically a permanent broiler, and the bottom oven only has a working bottom coil. With toddlers running around the house, it's safer to use the top oven, so I learned how to hack it with a top broiler only. I only own two baking sheets, and only one with a lip on it, which is a cast iron pizza pan that my husband got me for Christmas a few years back. It is perfect for cooking meat, because the lip keeps juices from dripping and overflowing. Incidentally, when you pair a cast iron with a broiler, you get crispy baking.

Maybe a trained chef could have told me that it's obvious that if you want crispy chicken, you need to broil it on a cast iron pan. But I discovered this purely by a series of fortunate accidents. My approach to chicken has the nice side effect of being super fast, so I've included it in my max efficiency recipe category. Again, you're talking about five minutes of prep time, and twenty minutes of cook time. You will need to flip the chicken and drain the juices in the middle, so you can't simply walk away for twenty minutes and do something else, but you can walk away and do two thing that take ten minutes each.