How to get your chicken browned on the underside without flipping it over

One of the easiest dishes you can replicate at home that comes closest to a restaurant-quality dish is roast chicken.

I do it all the time as I enjoy eating the satisfying outcome....and my preferred cut is the chicken leg as it's meatier...and juicier.

But I don't do it as often with a whole chicken leg and would usually make it with chicken wings instead because of one outcome...the underside of the chicken leg is difficult to brown and tends to get soggy sitting in oil and its own juices during the cooking process.

Of course one can get round it by roasting the underside facing up first and turning it around midway through the cook but I'm all about lazy cooking and once I put it in the oven, I don't want to have to do anything to it and I certainly don't want to have to remember to flip it over.  So, it ends up undercooked sometimes (after my usual cooking time) and I had to put it back into the oven to cook longer.  Also flipping it means you don't get that nice browning on one side and instead you may end up getting it half-browned on both sides which isn't the most ideal! >.<

Well, that was before I discovered a way out...by putting the chicken on a rack.  Season your chicken leg as you would and place it on a metal rack over a lined sheet pan.  You can even put some potato wedges underneath to cook at the same time.

I put it to bake at the same temperature and same time frame as I usually would with chicken and it'll come out looking like this...beautifully browned! :P  I decided to use aluminium foil as I felt that baking paper tends to be slippery and it'd be quite disastrous if the rack was to slide on the sheet pan as I move it in and out of the oven.

Let me show you just how well browned the underside is...without even flipping it! ;)  It gets this way because the hot air gets to circulate underneath the chicken and cooks it more evenly resulting in a better charred chicken.

Not only that but the chicken sitting on a rack will drip delicious fats, oil and seasoning onto the potatoes underneath thereby enhancing them with even more flavour.

But as with most ovens (and mine is no exception), heat is not evenly distributed throughout the oven (some spots tend to be hotter than others), so I'd need to toss the potatoes around to get a more even browning but I can't do that when they're sitting underneath the rack...but it's ok as they're still cooked through and delicious.

And because the chicken is elevated higher on a rack in the oven where it's hotter at the top, I find that the chicken achieves a higher level of browning.  In fact, the charring can get so intense that I (sometimes) have to cover the chicken with a sheet of foil (towards the end of cooking time) to prevent further browning! >_<

Not only that but I recently discovered that if I put the sheet pan directly onto the knob of my microwave/convection oven (and not on the wire rack meant for baking purposes after removing the three-legged prongs and turntable for microwave cooking), the sheet pan will continuously turnaround giving rise to an evenly browned chicken (and potatoes) without the need of turning or tossing them around.  That was great news as a well charred chicken...all round.....is a better tasting chicken for sure! ^o^

So, the next time you're thinking of roasting chicken legs, you might want to give this method of sitting the chicken leg on top of a rack a try for greater browning on top as well as at the bottom.