This recipe is pretty easy to execute, and every time I make it, it delivers with amazing flavor and texture. Crispy skin lemon and herb chicken legs with sautéed chorizo broccolini.
What The Fuck Do You Need?
- Two chicken legs (thigh and drum X 2)
- One bundle of broccolini (aka baby broccoli)
- Lemon juice
- Oregano
- Salt
- Cracked black pepper
- Onion powder
- Garlic powder
- Crushed red pepper
- Vegetable oil
- Butter
- Dry, cured sausage (the hard kind, like a pepperoni or chorizo)
How The Fuck Do You Make It?
STEP 1
The first thing you need to do is make the lemon-herb paste. This is basically made “to taste,” so you can vary the proportions and amounts to your liking. Just keep the consistency to a paste and not too liquidy. Combine your salt, cracked black pepper, crushed red pepper, oregano, onion powder and garlic powder into a small dish or bowl and add lemon juice. Stir until mixed into a paste.
That shit is going to smell amazing: very Greek/Italian. Try not to shove it down your throat just yet, because you need it for the later steps.
STEP 2
pre-heat your oven to 350, rinse and prep your broccolini, and chop up your sausage as such:
STEP 3
Next, you’re going to shove some butter and your lemon-herb paste underneath the chicken skin, without completely removing the skin from the meat, of course. Spread it around evenly so you don’t get any blank spaces of flavor. Don’t worry either – you’d be surprised how much the butter helps to slosh the spices around once it gets cooking. Get down into those drumsticks too!
STEP 4
Get your vegetable oil in a pan and heat it up. You shouldn’t need more than two cups of oil. Just enough to get the majority of the chicken skin into the hot oil should do the trick. Then drop your chicken legs in, top-side down.
You’re going to flip these bitches once they get golden and crispy. Try to keep the skin covering the meat too on the bottom side when you flip it (that part of the skin doesn’t quite connect to the meat as well as it does in other areas).
STEP 5
Remove the chicken from the frying pan once the other side gets nice and crispy brown, and place the legs onto a baking sheet. Pop that shit into the oven for another 20-30 minutes, top-side up.
STEP 6
Clean your pan (or use a second one), and then begin to sautee your sausage/chorizo. When they start to release some grease, you can add your broccolini in there as well.
STEP 7
When the pan is nice and hot, and your broccolini is really cooking, I want you to hit the pan with a few ounces of water to deglaze the pan. Doing this releases all that nice brown sausagey goodness from the pan and puts that flavor directly into the broccolini.
Once the water is all evaporated from the pan again, your broccolini should be fully cooked and your chorizo should be slightly crisped and browned. Plate that shit.
STEP 8
Remove your chicken from the oven and plate that shit alongside your broccolini.
That’s it. Super simple, and this will feed two people, unless you’re a fat fuck like me and can eat it all by yourself.
I also like to add sliced onion and fresh garlic into the broccolini sautee as well sometimes. When I did this recipe, I didn’t have that stuff handy, but here’s a shot of the finished plate from a previous night when I made the dish with onions and fresh garlic. As you can see, the skin actually came out a little nicer that time, due to better butter coverage and frying technique.
