home

Stupid Simple Roast Chicken Parts

In many places on the east coast, you can get a 10 pound bag of chicken leg quarters for somewhere between $6 and $9. This is my easy way of prepping a bunch of chicken for the week ahead, assuming an air fryer is available. If you're reading this after 2025 and don't have one… just visit your local thrift shop. You'll probably be able to find one for about $10.

This only works with leg quarters, bone-in thighs, or bone-in drumsticks. Chicken breast will dry out and become practically inedible. Wings will probably be edible but will be seriously overcooked. The trick here is to cook the chicken low and slow, because there's delicious fat in the skin that renders out and combines with the flour/starch, which will then crisp up when we finish this in the air fryer.

This becomes incredibly economical when you use the bones for stock and use the drippings for roast vegetables or potatoes. It's maybe $10 worth of ingredients for a ton of meat, a quart of chicken stock, and enough usable fat that you don't need to buy oil.

roast-chicken.jpg
Figure 1: Pictures like this seem to mystify people who do not understand the concept of leftovers.

Ingredients

Equipment

Steps

  1. Separate the thigh and drumstick for each leg quarter. If you're inexperienced, you can bend the leg to get an idea of where the joint is. You want to be cutting the cartilage, not the bone.
  2. Place the wire rack over the baking sheet. You may need more than one baking sheet or wire rack to cook all 10 lbs of the chicken.
  3. Combine the flour, corn starch, and seasoning in a large bowl, and dredge each chicken piece thoroughly in the mixture. It helps to treat one hand as the "dry hand" that touches the flour and chicken that's been coated in the flour, and one hand as the "wet hand" that touches the uncoated chicken.
  4. Lay each piece on the wire rack and bake for 2 hours at 275°F.
  5. When you're ready to serve, portion off the amount you want to eat and air fry at 350°F for 15 minutes. Let cool in the basket for at least 2 minutes.

Notes

Cajun seasoning is pretty good for this.

Back to Cookbook