Sheet Pan Greek Lemon Chicken
Ima cut to the chase here, because I have a screamy toddler who desperately wants her socks off but won’t let me help her take said socks off. Two-year-olds, am I right?
After 12 years, more or less, of being an adult who cooks meals for herself, I’m finally figuring out the rules of how cooking actually works. If, for some reason, a recipe doesn’t come together right — boom! I’m starting to be able to figure out how to fix that recipe.
Enter my Sheet Pan Greek Lemon Chicken. This is an amalgamation of recipes. First, this excellent Instant Pot freezer meal, which initially introduced me to Greek Lemon Chicken when I made it as a postpartum freezer meal and enjoyed the heck out of it once the baby had arrived. If you’re incredibly low on time, happen to have a pressure cooker, and don’t care about the texture of your food, go ahead and make it. It’s easy and delicious. Just, not crispy in any way.
Second, this pretty-good-but-less-excellent recipe for one-skillet Greek Lemon Chicken. I say less-excellent because the flavors are great and the texture is spot-on…except that the chicken wasn’t fully cooked through when I made it. Also, I prefer to use fresh oregano, as is the case of the first recipe. And I prefer to throw everything on a sheet pan and walk away, rather than parboil potatoes and then sauté them before even sticking them in the oven. Wow that’s a lot of work.
Enter the third recipe, which is what I call “Moving Walkway Chicken.” It’s a dead-simple take on Samin Nosrat’s Conveyer Belt Chicken from Salt Fat Acid Heat that literally involves sprinkling the outside of bone-in skin-on chicken thighs with salt and then sticking them in my convection toaster oven for a half hour or so at 400º F. (You’re welcome for that bonus recipe. Seriously, it’s a flavor/texture revolution.)
So I smashed all of those recipes together and came up with this. My first kinda-sorta original recipe creation! I’m so proud of myself I’m weeping. Or maybe I’m weeping because the chicken is SO EASY and SO GOOD. Go ahead and take a stab at it, and let me know what you think of it in the comments.
Sheet Pan Greek Lemon Chicken & Potatoes
Ingredients
- 2ish lbs bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs patted dry
- kosher salt
- 1 lb baby potatoes
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 tbsp fresh oregano leaves chopped
- 2 lemons
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 400º F. Line a rimmed sheet pan with aluminum foil.
- Zest one of the lemons, then halve and juice it. Put the juice and the zest in a large Ziplock bag. Slice the second lemon into thin rounds.
- Drop the chicken thighs, potatoes, chopped oregano, olive oil, lemon slices, and salt into the bag. Shake it all up so everything is thoroughly and evenly coated with salty, juicy goodness. Dump contents of bag onto the sheet pan.
- Roast in the oven for 30-40 minutes, or until the chicken skin is crispy and the potatoes are nice and soft on the inside. Enjoy with a squeeze of lemon, a sprinkling of parsley, and/or a crumble of fresh feta.
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