Sticky Lemon Oregano Chicken is a delicious sweet-sour, tangy, herby chicken dinner. It will be on repeat at your house.
Roasted chicken or turkey skin is my guilty pleasure. I have always loved sneaking into the kitchen to pick off the crispiest, brownest pieces of skin before anyone else gets at them, or – horrors! – before some well-meaning cook discards the fatty skin.
I know the food police think we should eat skinless chicken in these vigilant nutritional times, but I don’t care. Chicken cooked with the bone in and the skin on tastes so much better as to be an entirely different experience than the underdressed variety.
This slightly sweet, lemony, herbaceous recipe tastes fabulous — meat, skin and all. And it’s a slight change of pace for chicken without being so weird you only want to eat it once. I’ve been known to make it twice in one week.
How to make Sticky Lemon Oregano Chicken
First, assemble your ingredients. That way you know if you have everything on hand.
I start by going to the back yard and picking a lemon. This is a dwarf Meyer lemon tree I planted in a half-whiskey barrel some years ago. It’s scrawny, but each year it gives me 20 or so lemons, and I am thrilled! (If you don’t have a lemon tree in your yard, get your lemons at the store. No stress.)
Then grab everything you need from the cabinet and refrigerator. For this recipe, we need only a few ingredients:
- chicken thighs with bone in and skin on
- fresh lemon juice
- honey
- olive oil
- garlic
- oregano
- kosher salt
Put chicken in a 13×9-inch baking dish. Mix everything else in a measuring cup, and then pour it over the chicken.
All the marinade/sauce is over the chicken and it’s ready for the oven.
When roasted, the chicken gets deeply burnished. I might have left the pan in a few minutes too long (or maybe not if you don’t mind a little char). I went to check my email (never do that, fellow home cooks…just don’t!). Anyway, I like it this way!
Fear no food! Eat the skin!
Note: I submitted this recipe to the national food magazine “Taste of Home” and they renamed it Oregano-Lemon Chicken and published it in Country Extra in Nov. 2004.
Sticky Lemon-Oregano Chicken is a delicious sweet-sour, tangy, herby chicken dinner. It will be on repeat at your house.
Ingredients
- 6-8 meaty chicken thighs (bone-in, skin left on), about 2-3 pounds
- .
- Marinade
- 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
- 2 tablespoons honey
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 3 cloves garlic, crushed, grated or finely minced
- 2 teaspoons dried oregano
- .
- Pinch of kosher salt
Directions
- Heat oven to 375F degrees. Mist a roasting pan or 13- by 9-inch baking dish with non-stick spray.
- Prepare the chicken: Using a poultry/food shears or knife, snip off and discard any big fat globs, leaving skin intact. Place chicken in pan.
- Make the marinade: In a small bowl or 1 cup measuring cup, stir all marinade ingredients together (lemon, honey, olive oil, garlic, oregano) and pour over chicken. Use all the marinade, don't hold any back. Sprinkle chicken with a pinch of kosher salt. Place pan in oven and roast chicken, uncovered, for a total of 45 minutes, basting with the accumulated juices once, at the halfway point. (If you don't have a baster, you can use a soup spoon by removing the hot pan from the oven, tilting it slightly, and collecting some accumulated juice to spoon over the chicken; return hot pan to the oven to finish the rest of the roasting time.)
- Remove chicken from oven, let rest for a couple of minutes and serve, spooning the pan juices over top of each thigh. See directions below if you'd like to turn the pan juices into a thicker "lemony gravy."
- Serves 6.
Notes
Recipe source: Dorothy Reinhold | Shockingly Delicious
Make quick gravy: If you like thicker juices or you want to create a sort of quickie gravy, pour the pan juices into a small saucepan (you’ll have about 1 cup-ish, depending on how much chicken you used and how much fat rendered out from it). In a small bowl, put 2 tablespoons of the chicken pan juices, and stir in 1 tablespoon cornstarch, until well blended into a slurry. Stir this slurry back into the pan juices in the saucepan. Cook and stir over medium heat until mixture boils; it will thicken as it reaches the boiling point. Boil 1 minute. Remove from heat and spoon newly thickened sauce over chicken and serve.
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Reader photo of Sticky Lemon Oregano Chicken
My former newspaper colleague Lori Valesko makes this recipe all the time, and snapped this photo of it ⇑. I want to dig right in! She says, “I doubled the lemon juice and used some arrowroot to make the gravy and it was a HIT with the fam! Paired it with mashed potatoes, (more surface area for the gravy), and green beans for the win. Thanks for saving my butt again.” You’re welcome, Lori. I just wrote “chicken thighs” on my shopping list.
Want another great lemony chicken thigh recipe?
Roast Chicken Thighs with Meyer Lemon and Smoked Paprika [3]
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This recipe for Sticky Lemon Oregano Chicken was originally published June 9, 2010 and has been refreshed and republished today.
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