Chicken thighs baked in bacon fat

Just a reminder that the original purpose of this blog when I started it in 2007 was to collect my personal recipes so that I could refer to it at work to get meal ideas for that evening. I’m not recommending this to anyone and apologies if this feels like a waste of your inbox space. It is part of a much larger and wacky experiment I am trying that I *won’t* go into at present but will eventually. Maybe.

So I’ve been cooking bacon for almost 2 weeks now and I keep pouring off the fat and putting it in a jar to do I dunno with. I was baconed out today, however, and did have like 8 chicken thighs that needed to be cooked lest they become a biohazard. They weren’t old by any means but I wanted to make sure they got used during their useful lifespan without playing some game of chicken (pardon the pun) with the expiry date.

So caveman brain here looked at the chicken, then the bacon fat still in the pan on the stove from the bacon I cooked the day before, and got an idea so lacking in effort I should get some sort of prize. So…

• 8 chicken thighs with skin and bone in
• 1 pan of bacon grease with all the drippings and crumbly bits from the previous day

I set the oven for 350 and plopped the thighs into the grease-filled pan. Then shoved it in the oven without even preheating because I don’t care. I set a timer for 20 minutes then came back, took the pan out of the oven and turned the thighs over. Crumbly bits had stuck to the bottom, which did not seem a bad thing. Put it back in the oven and it got another 20 minutes. I tested the temp and in some places it was 190 degrees F so it was certainly cooked. Then I had the bright idea to turn them upright again and try to crispy up the top part. I set the oven to broil and the time for 10 minutes.

It got to 5 minutes when the fire alarm went off and I put on the exhaust fan as the alarm screamed ‘Fire! Fire! and the dog barked. Note to self: in the future, turn on the vent fan and broil for 5 minutes.

They came out looking like this:

They came out juicy and had some crunchy parts on the skin, the crumbly bits from the bacon added a nice flavor, as did the bacon fat, and the grease contained enough salt that adding additional salt was unnecessary.

The kid texted she was hungry and I told her about these. She seemed excited. When she came home she didn’t go near them. Didn’t tell me why, just ate leftover pasta.

Would I make it again? Yeah. Except for the fire alarm part it was a pretty darn easy recipe to make. I did have to pour off some of the bacon grease/chicken juice when I turned it over because it was too high for the shallow pan.

But is it keto? Trick question. Of course. The is zero carbs – I had three today and my ketones are at 2.1 mmol/L right now and I had the last one an hour ago.

EOM