Do Not Preheat the Oven Before Cooking Chicken Thighs
Preheating the oven is, for the most part, a scam. Unless you’re baking a recipe that includes some kind of baking powder , you’re wasting the energy your oven expends when it’s running to reach its target temperature. In some cases, gently heating food along with the oven even provides several benefits. One such case is bacon ; the other is chicken, especially chicken thighs.
Like bacon, chicken thighs are high in fat. Unlike bacon, they also contain a lot of connective tissue, mostly collagen. Both fat and collagen do best when cooked slowly, which gives that thick layer of fat under the skin time to melt, resulting in crispier skin. It also gives the collagen time to convert to gelatin, resulting in a juicier, richer-tasting bird.
It’s also faster because you don’t have to wait for the oven to “heat up”. All you have to do is marinate, salt, or season the thighs as you normally would, then place them in a cold, greased skillet or skillet. Place this pan in a cold oven and set the temperature to 375℉. The slowly increasing heat will gently cook the chicken, pulling out the fat and melting all that wonderful collagen.
After half an hour, measure the chicken with a thermometer. You need a temperature of 170℉, so keep cooking until you reach it. (This can take 15 to 30 minutes or more, but I avoid giving exact cooking times here because ovens and how they heat up are highly inconsistent.) If the skin isn’t as crispy as you like, when it reaches that temperature , go ahead and place it under the broiler for a few minutes. Serve immediately (reserve the remaining chicken skin for the greaves ).