Just what it says on the tin: what temperature should I bake chicken at? I see a range from 350 to 425 in various recipes, all of them saying “about an hour”.
More specifically, I have several pounds of drumsticks given to me by a friend (I guess I look thin and poor or something - no, really, it’s MUCH appreciated!) I’d like to bake. Basic simple breading, line 'em up in a pan, and bake. Proceed to eat, keep, reheat, use in chicken salad, etc. Got everything set, except…
What temp/time for cooking?
My preference for time would be an hour or less, if that makes a difference. I’m also not entirely thrilled at cranking the oven above 400, but that may just be my paranoia. I mean, nothing bad happened that time I did accidentally set the oven on fire, about 20 years ago, and I haven’t set the building on fire accidentally since last summer. And we put that one out, too, without major damage.
I usually do chicken pieces at around 365-375F for around an hour. Depends on how much you have and how crowded they are. But yea, for dark meat drumsticks, I’d do them probably around an hour at 365 bake and breaded, but that’s just me. If you are breading them and faux frying them in the oven, you will probably need a decent coating of oil in the bottom, and I like to turn mine about halfway through.
325 - 350 °F for 75 – 90 minutes is SOP. Any less and they’ll be notably undercooked. However, my new tabletop convection oven does drumsticks quite fast—about 45 minutes at 350 °F.
Dark meat bone-in chicken? Low and slow is the way to go, dark meat takes longer than boneless chicken breast, and you don’t want the coating to burn fast in a hot oven and be raw inside. I would say 325 degrees for an hour, take a look, and turn up the heat to 350 degrees for another 15 minutes.
I concur with the 325 setting, FWIW, although 90 minutes for drumsticks seems excessive. I do whole chickens at this temp and they come out just fine in about that amount of time.
Dark meat chicken should be cooked until its internal temperature is 165ºF. Time doesn’t matter, internal meat temperature does. As we don’t know if your oven runs hot, very hot, cold, very cold or just right. Invest in a meat thermometer, and I would start temping after 45 minutes.
That said, drumsticks will benefit from lower and slower cooking. To cook thoroughly without overbrowning the breading, I would keep it around 325º to 350º. Hot enough to cook the breading, not too hot to burn it given the time needed.
425-450 for 45 minutes. I usually throw a cast iron skilled in the oven for 5 or 10 minute to heat it up, and put the trussed chicken in it to cook. I think I read once that the idea is to have the thighs down near the hot iron and they cook a bit hotter than the breast, so that both white and dark meat are done but not dry. Not sure if that’s real or not, but I can say that it makes a damn good (and easy) chicken.
If you don’t want to heat up the house on a nice day like his, consider cooking on the grill. I use a small Weber portable grill, made an offset fire with the chix on the cooler side. An oven thermometer on the grate showed 300-325 for the entire 90 minutes of the cook. I’d say they were a bit over done but still just fine. I didn’t do it for this last batch but chicken legs will certainly benefit from an overnight brining, too.
I do 500 for about 50-60 minutes. I’m on phone, but look up “Thomas Keller roast chicken.” It’s the best roast chicken I’ve ever had–perfect skin, juicy inside.
Yes, but the higher temps mentioned above are for roasting whole chickens… The OP has drumsticks only, and dark meat bone-in chicken pieces benefit from low and slow.
I do those at 450, too. I prefer high-heat roasting for pretty much all chicken applications. Skin is to die for. If you’re not a crispy chicken skin person, maybe it doesn’t matter, but I’m fully converted to high heat methods for roasted skin-on chicken parts.
Actually, I glossed over that part of the OP. (And now it makes a little more sense to me why “bake” was used in the title instead of “roast.”) The chicken I roast is always without breading. I’d do breaded chicken with a little slower oven, 375-400.
Well, you see, my husband doesn’t each chicken skin at all due to concerns about his cholesterol (doctor’s instructions, in other words) and I’m not a terribly big fan of it myself. Add in that most of this is going to be de-boned and used with other ingredients and the how crispy the skin is, is irrelevant in this particular case. I just care that they peel easy. Which they did.
Uh-huh - “shake and bake” is a LOT more coated than what I did, which was mostly add seasoning. The coating was very minimal.