Why It Works
- Using bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs instead of leaner breast meat sets you up for success in the juiciness department.
- Putting the sheet pan in the oven while it’s preheating before adding the vegetables ensures the veggies start cooking as soon as they hit the pan, leading to better browning and crisping and more concentrated flavors.
- Adding the vegetables and chicken at staggered stages and temperatures ensures that everything cooks properly and at the same time.
I don’t have a dishwasher, so I love any recipe that can be made in just one cooking vessel. On busy weeknights, I also like a recipe that is largely hands-off so I can multitask and do chores such as sorting mail or doing laundry while dinner is taking care of itself in the oven. This easy chicken dinner fits the billon both scores, plus it’s delicious and perfect for fall. Meaty bone-in chicken thighs, Brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes, shallots, and applewood-smoked bacon are roasted all on one pan for a full dinner with minimal cleanup and plenty of hands-off time. The Brussels sprouts are tender with dark, crispy edges, the chicken is juicy with crispy skin, the sweet potatoes are on what one taster called “flavor boost” from absorbing all the spices and juices from chicken, and the bacon lends its salty, smoky flavor to the whole meal.
Serious Eats / Robby Lozano
The whole shebang gets a spicy-sweet-umami punch from gochujang, which is whisked into an oil and vinegar dressing and used to season the chicken and vegetables before cooking.The gochujang performs double duty, as it’s also incorporated into a mayo-based finishing sauce to spoon over the roasted chicken and vegetables right before serving.
This autumnal awesomeness is what our Birmingham-based test kitchen colleague Renu Dhar created when we asked her to develop a sheet-pan chicken dinner that’s perfect for fall. Read on for our key tips for making the best sheet-pan chicken dinners along with the full recipe.
3 Simple Tips for a Sheet-Pan Chicken Dinner That’s Anything but Basic
Choose bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs. While it is possible to roast boneless, skinless chicken breasts without them drying out, choosing fattier bone-in, skin-on thighs all but guarantees juicy meat. The thigh meat’s abundance of connective tissue makes it both flavorful and forgiving of longer cooking times, unlike breast, which tends to dry out quickly. So even if you get distracted and leave the chicken thighs to cook for a few extra minutes, you’ll still have meat that’s tender and moist. Thighs that are about five to six ounces each work best for this recipe.
Serious Eats / Robby Lozano
Add the vegetables, chicken, and bacon in stages. The problem with many sheet-pan chicken recipes is that everything just gets tossed on the same pan at the same time, then chucked in the oven to roast. This leads to uneven cooking and one element can be undercooked while another is overcooked—you could end up with soggy, underdone vegetables and charred chicken or undercooked chicken and vegetables that have turned to charcoal. To avoid this, we start by preheating the pan, then add the vegetables and roast briefly at 450°F before nestling the chicken into the pan and adding the bacon.
As Serious Eats editorial director Daniel Gritzer points out in his guide to how to make a sheet pan dinner with no recipe, getting your sheet pan hot in the oven before putting your food on it can help jumpstart browning the Brussels sprouts. Once the chicken and bacon is added, we turn down the oven to 400°F and continue cooking until everything is perfectly browned and cooked through. To further ensure browning and keep the dish from being soggy, be sure to spread the vegetables out on the sheet pan rather than piling them up.
Serious Eats / Robby Lozano
Finish the dish with a creamy, flavorful sauce. While part of the beauty of a sheet-pan chicken comes from its simplicity, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t zhuzh it up a bit, especially if you can do so with ingredients that are already sitting in your fridge. Here, we serve the chicken and vegetables with a simple sauce of mayonnaise, gochujang, and sweet and tangy rice vinegar— the latter two are also used for seasoning the chicken and vegetables before cooking so you’ll already have them on hand for this recipe. It takes less than a minute to whisk the sauce up but it pulls the meal together for a dinner that’s easy enough for a weeknight, but special enough for company.
Editor’s Note
This recipe was developed by Renu Dhar. The headnote was written by Megan O. Steintrager.
