This is a great weekday recipe as you just throw all the flavours in to marinate the chicken and the oven does the rest of the work for you. Clean up is super easy too. Baked chicken is a familiar recipe to most people so you are just switching up the taste by using soya sauce rather than herbs as the main flavour.
Extra tip: If you are just starting to cook with soy and don’t want to buy both dark and light soya sauce, Kitty recommends buying the dark soy sauce, and replace the light with dark with extra salt. So for this recipe, put 2 Tbsp of dark soya sauce and do two pinches of salt. This way, you still get the colour and aroma of the soy in the dish.
Kitty loves to make this dish, with bok choy as the side dish, and serves with rice.
List of ingredients for easy copy and pasting:
- 2 pounds chicken legs with bones and skin (about 8 legs)
- 1 Tbsp dark soya sauce
- 1 Tbsp light soya sauce
- 1 Tbsp Chinese cooking rice wine
- 1 tsp sugar
- a pinch of salt
- a pinch of white pepper (optional)
- few drops of sesame oil (optional)
Tasted great and I agree about the easy clean-up!
I didn’t have the brand of soya sauces you highlighted on hand, but even with the more generic low-sodium soy sauce I had in the fridge, adding some new flavors was a nice change for one of my go-to dishes.
I usually go with a type of southern barbeque marinade with oven-baked drumsticks. It would be great to try a good Chinese-style barbecue marinade on a dish like this.
I look forward to more such visual recipes from Chef Kitty. Thanks!
Thanks Margo! You can certainly use other brands of soy sauce that you like. The point is, you shouldn’t cheap out on the soy sauce as it’s the core of the marinade. The brand mentioned is just a recommendation from Kitty if you feel a bit lost.
I’ve used this recipe many times. This is a very easy dish to make, and the chicken legs are just as nice eaten hot or cold.