Sheet-Pan Roasted Chicken
Any parts, any seasonings will work for this ultra-flexible sheet pan recipe.
A dead-simple technique for perfectly roasted chicken creates a quick pan sauce, too
Looking for better ways to roast chicken, we found a simple method that sped up the process, gave us a quick sauce and allowed for endless variations—all on one pan.
Roasting on a rimmed baking sheet rather than in a deep roasting pan allows for better air circulation, accelerating cooking and boosting browning. It’s a strategy cooks in the U.K. use often for one-pan dinners—better known as traybakes.
The traybake is the epitome of efficiency. Toss a mix of meat and vegetables in oil and seasonings, transfer to a pan and roast. In an hour or less, dinner is served.
At Milk Street, we loved the ease of the traybake. But we wanted a roast chicken recipe so simple it would work with any seasonings, so we narrowed our focus to the meat.
We started with bone-in, skin-on chicken parts to keep the time in the oven to about 40 minutes. That also solved the whole-chicken problem of the legs taking longer to cook than the breasts. If the quicker-cooking breasts reached 160°F before the thighs and drumsticks hit 175°F, we simply removed them and continued cooking the dark meat.
For seasoning, we used ground coriander and ginger, plus a bit of sugar to balance the flavors and brown the skin. Cooking at 450°F gave us crisp skin without drying out the meat. It also produced a light fond on the sheet pan—another opportunity to build flavor.
We used water to deglaze the fond, creating the base for a quick sauce that we finished with lemon juice and zest and fresh cilantro. It was good start, but to give the sauce deeper flavor and better body, we added 10 cloves of garlic to the baking sheet. As the meat roasted, the garlic caramelized and softened. We then mashed them into a paste directly on the pan and mixed them into the sauce.
The result was delicious, but best of all, the method allowed for countless seasoning variations, including a mix of za'atar and oregano, and a jerk-inspired blend of warm spices and dried herbs. It also was simple to tweak the pan sauce with different acids (lime instead of lemon) and herbs (scallions and fresh oregano instead of cilantro) to match the seasonings
Albert Stumm
Roasted garlic pan sauce, in two minutes
Mash the roasted garlic cloves (and habanero, if using for jerk chicken) to a paste on the baking sheet, mixing it with any liquid on the pan.
Pour 1/3 cup water onto the hot baking sheet, then use a wooden spoon to scrape up any browned bits. Pour the mixture into a small bowl.
Whisk acid, oil and fresh herbs into the mixture to finish the garlicky pan sauce. We like either lemon or lime and cilantro, oregano or scallions.
