Gloria’s Oven-Fried Chicken Legs
When you are 10 and love dinnertime, there is nothing quite like my grandma Gloria’s chicken legs. We’d go to her house, mostly on Sundays after church, and she’d have a relish tray (pickles, olives, and sliced tomatoes). I’m sure there were lots of other side dishes, but I didn’t care about any of them. I was there for the chicken — the juicy, fall-apart, drippy chicken legs with the salty, crunchy, oily, crust. These are the things dreams are made of, and I know she learned these from her mother, my great-gran Thora.
18 chicken legs
2 cups buttermilk
Sea salt and pepper to taste
3 cups mild oil, suitable for frying
3 cups flour
Soak the chicken in buttermilk for at least one hour and up to overnight before frying. Remove the chicken from buttermilk.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Liberally salt and pepper chicken. Heat a skillet with the oil over medium heat to about 300 degrees. Dredge each chicken leg into flour, and shake off excess. Place floured chicken legs into the oil without crowding them; you are simply browning the legs, not cooking them all the way through.
Lay the browned legs into a roasting pan; you’ll need to do this in batches. Don’t be afraid to pile the legs on top of each other. Bake for at least 90 minutes, maybe even up to 2 hours, covered.
Sprinkle chicken with sea salt to finish, and enjoy the fall-apart goodness. Enjoy!
This recipe is from my cookbook, Rustic Joyful Food: Generations. You can purchase a copy here!