Stuffed Chicken Thighs

These easy peasy sausage stuffed chicken thighs are so delicious they’ll be on your regular rotation!

Stuffed Chicken Made Easy

I love me some stuffed chicken, but like many, I find breasts hard to stuff. Mainly, it’s difficult to get the stuffing to stay in the chicken.

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This recipe uses boneless, skinless thighs. Turns out that thighs are pretty easy to stuff because the removal on the bone make the perfect “pocket” for any filling! In fact, this may be my new go-to piece for stuffing since it’s so easy to do. I prefer that part anyway so it’s a perfect solution.

Choose A Mild Sausage

Just recently I was watching a lot of food history documentaries on YouTube and of course, YouTube comes up with suggestions of what to watch next. A lot of those suggestions were shows with Mary Berry.

For those who have never heard of her, she’s a British icon as far as cooking is concerned–and has even superseded the great Fannie Craddock (another British cooking icon) in my opinion. Anyway, Mary Berry’s approach to cooking has always been making good food in as little time as possible. This recipe comes from her, and it’s just wonderful.

Britain basically has all the same products we use here in the USA, but sometimes call them by different names. For instance, “icing sugar” is confectioner’s sugar and “aubergines” are eggplants. However one thing that’s very different there than it is here is sausage.

British sausage is more like bratwurst than it is our breakfast sausage or Italian sausage, so I had to adapt the recipe a bit. Mary Berry’s filling used quite a bit of herbs and spices which added flavors to the very mild British kind. So I cut out all that and just used the parsley and onion.

Great Tips

One little tip I picked up from watching this video was using honey to make sure things brown well–especially with short cook times.

You don’t use a lot, just a few drops will do. In fact, I doubt you’d even taste it.

I’ve noticed that things wrapped in bacon are generally overcooked by the time the bacon browns and brushing with a drop or two of honey (which the Brits call “runny honey”) does the trick. It also works for cooking chicken strips for stir fries that cook too quickly to brown. Just add about a teaspoon of honey and voila–lovely and golden.

This next tip comes from me–do yourself a favor and buy yourself an inexpensive kitchen scale. They’re small and come in handy for many things besides cooking. It’s absolutely necessary if you plan to cook some European baking recipes because they weigh everything. You’ll get more accurate results weighing than measuring in cups–which is especially true for flour.

Flour has a range of weights when measured by the cup because of differences in how the cup is filled, but 50 grams of flour is always 50 grams. Rose Levy Beranbaum advocated this years ago for the most foolproof way to bake. You won’t be sorry.

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The Recipe

Stuffed Chicken Thighs

 

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Prep time

10 mins

Cook time

45 mins

Total time

55 mins

 

Author: Judith Hannemann

Recipe type: Main

Cuisine: American

Serves: 8

Ingredients

• 16 oz mild bulk breakfast sausage
• ¼ cup chopped fresh parsley
• 2 tbs minced onion
• 8 strips bacon
• 8 boneless skinless chicken thighs
• 1 tbs honey

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Line a large baking sheet with parchment or foil.
2. In a large bowl, mix the sausage, parsley and minced onion. Divide into 8 equal portions and shape each into a log no longer than the length of the chicken where the bone was.
3. Place chicken skinned side down and open them out. Place a log in the center of each thigh where the bone was and fold the chicken around it.
4. Wrap each thigh in one strip of bacon, seam side under the chicken.
5. Place the chicken on the prepared pan and brush each thigh with the honey.
6. Bake for 35 minutes or until cooked through and the bacon is golden brown and crispy. Let the chicken rest for 10 minutes before serving.

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