Having tried both bone-in and boneless thighs, I know where I stand on this matter. An experimental minimal effort recipe.

Time: 3/5
Barely made it under the one hour mark.

Effort: 3/5
A bit of knife work and marinating works wonders

Plumbing the Depths

Of all the cooking methods I’ve tried, nothing has beaten roasting chicken in the oven in terms of minimal effort, easy clean up and great taste – for thigh meat. Unlike chicken breasts, thighs are much more forgiving. They stay good even if you go over the target temp, they stay good after a few days in the fridge, and they stay good after reheating with a microwave. Cook with chicken thighs.

That’s why oven-roasted chicken and rice in the rice cooker is one of my favourite meal prep templates. Long time readers of this blog will know this from the long, illustrious list of chicken and rice recipes that have graced this page: Miso Honey Chicken, Tangy Garlicky Chicken and Yogurt Mint Chicken, to name some of my favourites.

This rabbit hole also led me to endeavours like the Barbecue Sauce Marinated Chicken recipe where I try to find how many corners I can cut and still get acceptable results for a chicken thigh meal prep. Turns out, just covering chicken in barbecue sauce and calling it a day was taking it a bit too far.

Ranch is another of those flavours that I’m exposed to very often through Western media, but I don’t think I’ve ever had ranch before. That is, until I bought some powdered Ranch back from my great American adventure. I was curious how it would do as a low effort marinade.

Tasting it neat (if you can call it that), it was a nice and gentle background of herbiness and savouriness, with a hint of mint which surprised me a little. No doubt great as a dressing or a sauce, but too weak to be a marinade on its own. I decided to punch it up a bit.

I’m glad I made some additions. Lemon juice brightened it up, and the garlic paste was much more aromatic than the dried garlic in the powder mix. A ton of black pepper is never a bad idea, and the chicken definitely benefited from some additional salt.

I’d say this was a successful trade off between the ease of off-the-shelf solutions, and the control you get from cooking from scratch. Turns out, a bit of effort goes a long way.

I would usually have my chicken with rice, but I had these drumsticks with some sweet potatoes. My grandmother gave us a batch, which I roasted in the best way I know how a couple days ago. That means the sweet potatoes didn’t have to compete for oven time with the chicken. So, all I had to do to make this a complete meal was stir fry some choy sum with a glug of oyster sauce.

Bone-in vs boneless chicken thighs

This recipe was also a test of bone in vs boneless thighs – the great debate in meal prep circles (or so I’d like to pretend). I accidentally bought drumsticks instead of the usual boneless thighs. I was actually kinda mad at myself, until I decided to turn a loss into a win and see if I was wrong to always go boneless.

The results aren’t clear cut. I might just be imagining things, but bone-in chicken seemed to be more tender and juicy than the boneless thighs I usually cook. So that’s a potential upside. But then, I didn’t do a side by side comparison so this isn’t a very conclusive observation.

One obvious difference is that the bone-in drumsticks took much longer to cook. Double the cooking time, in fact. I pulled them out at the usual 20 minute mark, only to find them still oozing blood from the bones. It might be that the heat can’t get to the meat near the bones as well, or it may be that deboned thighs lie flatter and thinner than drumsticks.

All in all, bone-in chicken thighs have potential advantages over boneless, but the greater cooking time is a definite detriment. Your mileage may vary though, if the longer cooking time doesn’t bother you (or you find the trade off worth it).  As for myself, I’ll have to run a proper side by side test to be sure. But until then, I’m sticking to boneless.

Dramatis Personae

Served 5.

Chicken drumsticks – 1kg, 9 pieces

Sure, bone in is cheaper than boneless, but you’re also paying for the bone and the bone doesn’t contribute to the amount of edible protein. The meat is thicker than a boneless thigh, so I made a few slashes into each drumstick to help the marinade penetrate better.

Powdered ranch dressing – 4 tablespoons

The label on the bottle said to use two teaspoons of powdered ranch for each chicken breast. I’m not using breasts, but assuming there are five breasts to a kilogram that adds up to 10 teaspoons. That’s about 3.3 tablespoons, so I rounded up to make sure I’m getting plenty of flavour.

Oil – 2 teaspoons

Just enough to coat the chicken, and give the powdered ranch something to stick to. There’s plenty of fat in the thighs, so there’s no need to add any more besides whatever is strictly necessary to help the marinade adhere to the meat.

Garlic paste – 1 tablespoon

There’s already dried garlic in the powdered ranch, but fresh(er) garlic adds different tasting notes. I get my garlic paste from the Nepali grocer. They usually sell a combined garlic and ginger paste because that’s how a lot of curry recipes begin, but I like to get the garlic and ginger separately because it gives me the flexibility to add one without the other (like how I want a dash of ginger paste in Gyudon without the sauce being overwhelmed by garlic).

Lemon juice – 2 teaspoons

I get mine in a bottle because I don’t use lemons frequently enough to justify keeping fresh lemons in stock. Sure, it’s less flavourful, but it’s better than using half a fresh lemon and having the other half rot away while I try and fail to come up with a way to use them.

Lots of black pepper, and salt to taste

It’s possible to reverse-engineer how much salt you should add to supplement the powdered ranch if you know how much salt you usually add to a kilogram of chicken.

Look at the nutrition label, figure out how many milligrams of sodium you’re adding, then add in the expected weight of the chloride associated with the sodium (keeping in mind that NaCl is half-chloride, and the molar weights of Na+ and Cl- are roughly 23 and 34.5 respectively).

It’s possible, but I didn’t. I’m trying to make dinner, not build a nuke. I just eyeballed the salt until it looked right to the ancestral spirits that live on in my heart. Go nerd out on science when you have time to make some Hot Spring Eggs.

Executive summary

1. The day before, make some slashes into the meat of each drumstick. 
2. Add marinade ingredients and massage into chicken. Refrigerate overnight.
3. On day of cooking, preheat oven to 200C/400F. Line a sheet tray with foil and parchment paper.
4. Roast chicken at 200C/400F for 40 minutes, or until skin is browned and juices run clear.
5. Serve with side dishes of choice.

Play by Play

Last things first. I’m making a few gashes into the drumstick to help the marinade penetrate. All the way down to the bone, in the thickest parts of the meat.

Massaging the marinade right inside the bag the chicken came in, because it already has a ziplock mechanism. No sense in dirtying another dish.

Pro tip: square bags stand up straight if you tuck the corners in.

Cooking on the day of. Normally I would start the rice cooker first, but since my carbs are already done I’ll begin with the chicken which takes the longest – or so I think.

World’s simplest four-ingredient vegetable stir fry: sweat garlic in oil until fragrant, stir in choy sum until wilted, add a glug of oyster sauce and stir to combine.

Here’s what things looked like 20 minutes in. Still pink around the bone, and oozing red from places (although I didn’t show it). You can also see how my oven doesn’t heat up evenly, some pieces are well browned while some are stubbornly blonde.

Shuffled the drumsticks so every piece gets some love, and sent them back into the oven for another 20 minutes while I did some dishes. They’re looking much better now.

Bon appetit! Standing the drumsticks up is a pretty low effort way to make it look better, and we all know how pretty food tastes better.

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