Baked Chicken Thighs with Pineapple and Cheese in the Oven
My all-time favourite chicken dish is oven-baked chicken thighs with pineapple under a cheese crust. You don't need to buy whole birds for it. You can make this dish with any part of the chicken that has plenty of meat and few bones — thighs, breast fillet and so on.
Back when we lived in the land of scrawny blue chickens, hardly anyone had the chance to serve fried drumsticks, wings or chicken fillet in spicy sauce for a holiday. For a simple reason: there weren't many chickens around, and collecting enough wings for one dish would have taken forever. So the most accessible dishes were plain fried chicken, chicken tabaka and soup. Things are different now — you walk into a shop and there are wings, there are feet, there's a soup set, there are feathers and beaks. Pick, sniff and buy. Sniffing is a must, buying is optional.
The domestic chicken is a useful bird and easy to raise. Mischievous, though. A priceless source of meat, eggs, feathers, down, droppings and havoc in the vegetable garden. I'm quite sure even our ancestors knocked wild red junglefowl off the trees and roasted them over a fire with great pleasure. Today more than 200 chicken breeds are known, and by some estimates there are five times as many domestic chickens in the world as there are people.
Before I was born, in 1962, my father “visited” Cuba. During the Cuban Missile Crisis. There is still a photo of a pile of shot wild chickens that the soldiers ate. So wild chickens still survive in some places.
Anyway. Back to cooking. I'm not suggesting you cook wild chickens — we don't have any. But we do have pineapples in the shops. Not great quality, admittedly, but still. If you prefer, you can use fresh pineapple. But I find canned rings do the job just fine.
A pineapple is a pine cone that grows in the vegetable garden. I remember getting the lowest possible mark at school for that sentence. Oh well. It's tasty, though you can't eat a lot of it.
Ingredients
8 servings
- Chicken thighs 8
- Hard cheese 250 g
- Homemade mayonnaise 4-5 tbsp
- Canned pineapple rings 8
- Spices: salt, black pepper, curry to taste
Step-by-step recipe
- So, we buy the chicken. In pieces. Many people go for fillet. I don't like white chicken meat, I prefer thighs. The meat there is tastier and more tender. But there's no accounting for taste… We buy thighs. Medium-sized. Say, eight to ten of them.
- At home, remove the skin from the thighs and cut out the bone. Throw them away, or better still, feed the leftovers to the ever-present yard cats.
- Cut each thigh fillet in half. Salt lightly, sprinkle with spices, add a tablespoon of rich homemade mayonnaise and put in the fridge for about an hour.
- A separate word about spices. Usually few people bother putting together their own blend. They buy a ready-made “For chicken” mix. Well, that probably makes sense. But if you're interested, the best blend for chicken is: salt — 1 tsp; sweet red paprika — 1 tsp; curry — 1 tsp; ground black pepper — a pinch on the tip of a knife; ground coriander — a pinch on the tip of a knife; dried basil — a pinch; granulated garlic — 0.5 tsp; chili pepper — to your liking.
- While the meat rests in the fridge, finely grate the cheese. A mild, sweetish cheese works better than a sharp one — something like Radomer or Swiss. With big holes. You'll need 250–300 g of cheese.
- The cheese is grated. Open the can of pineapple and drain the juice, though in my house somebody drinks it. Take out the rings. There are usually 10 in a can. Pieces of meat — 8–10, pineapple rings — 8–10.
- Take out the meat. Lightly grease a baking tray with vegetable oil so the meat doesn't stick while cooking. Lay the pieces on the tray so they aren't packed tightly, but without gaps either.
- One pineapple ring on each piece of meat.
- Sprinkle the dish with grated cheese. All over, without gaps. So that neither meat nor pineapple is visible. You can add a little mayonnaise on top. But the chicken turns out wonderful without it too.
- Put in the oven at 180 °C. The chicken cooks for 30–40 minutes; as soon as it's golden and the meat is done, take it out. The main thing is not to miss the moment, or it will burn.
- Chicken with pineapple is served hot or cold. For a holiday table, the chicken thighs can be cooked the day before and then quickly reheated in the microwave, just like the French-style baked meat recipe.
- Oven-baked chicken thighs with pineapple are very filling and delicious. Especially when the chicken sits on a slice of really fresh bread.
| Yield: | 8 servings |
| Calories: | 220 |
| Prep: | 1 h 30 mins |
| Cooking: | 60 mins |
| Ready in: | 2 h 30 mins |
| Category: | Main Dishes |
| Cuisine: | European |
| Rating: |
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4.7
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