Hi! I’m Tom Papoutsis. Today we’re doing chicken basics. We just got done doing our rub, and now we’re going to bake our chicken. We’re actually going to use the rub that we just made in a previous clip to put on our chicken, to bake out chicken.

Essentially, what I’m going to do I’m going to take the chicken that we started out cutting up today. Now, we’re 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’s very nice and black and I very carefully work with this thing to keep it nice and seasoned so things don’t stick. But what I’m going to do is I’m going to arrange this chicken. I have a piece of a thigh, I have the leg and now this is actually a breast here.

Now whenever we’re baking chicken, the first thing we need to do is preheat our oven. I’ve 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. Figured 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 to 400 for 1 hour with bone-in chicken as you work.

Boneless chicken breast or boneless chicken typically you only have to go about 30 to 35 minutes, 40 on the outside. So it takes less if you do not have the bone in the chicken. I’m 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’ll take my fingers like this and I just kind of sprinkle it on.

Now, it’s called a rub. Why do we call it rub? Well, because what we’re going to do is we’re going to put that on her. I’m not worried about this other stuff coming out of the edge here. That’s irrelevant. What we’re going to do is we’re going to get this chicken coated with this rub, get it coated real good and then I’m actually going to physically rub this.

Now you can see, there’s a lot of rub for what we’ve got. You see how it sticks to my fingers. Imagine how it sticks to this chicken. And I just kind of pat it, rub it. If you want to, look here, this is what you can’t see. I’m 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’m going to pat that in, now you’ve got some flavor going to the inside. You’ve 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’m going over the sink, wash my hands and then we’re going to come back, put it in our preheated oven and after it’s done, we’ll pull it out and we’ll show you the finished product.

Okay it’s been about an hour. Our chicken that we put in the oven to bake is actually done. We’re ready to pull it out. So right now, let’s pull the chicken out of the oven, nice, well done crispy chicken. As you can see, we’re really going here as far as the grease is concerned. That’s because of the fat from the skin. I’m going to go ahead and just take this and plate this up. Here’s our breast, here’s our thigh, and we’ll get our leg out here, there we go. And there’s our baked chicken.

Next, we’ll make fried chicken.