I prepared these chicken thighs using my special double cast iron technique, which I love because it creates a great crust on any protein I sear in the pans and cooks everything quickly. This is my go-to method for cooking most proteins these days. As soon as I get home from work, I preheat the two cast iron pans in the oven at the highest heat setting. While the pans are heating up, I go about my evening routine, tidying up the kitchen and seasoning the chicken. By the time I'm done, the pans are ready to use.

For this recipe, I added some Indian-style spices to fancy it up, but it could be made simpler with just salt, pepper, and spray oil. Black cumin seeds are my new favorite spice, and I sometimes mix them with cream cheese to make a delicious dip for pork rinds (another fantastic keto snack). I'm always tweaking my double cast iron recipes and would love to hear any suggestions on how to improve the technique or the flavors for this recipe.

Basic Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to the highest setting and place two cast iron pans in it to preheat as well.

Ingredients

Considerations

• If I wasn’t on keto I would have marinated these thighs in greek yogurt with the spices below. You can do that for a few hours or overnight to get great flavor.
• It’s fine to make the spice mix in advance but I would sprinkle the salt on separately.

Detailed instructions with images

Spices

For this recipe I mixed up the spices first both for the blog image and in order to get a sense of the proportions of the spices. When I make this in the future I’ll likely just sprinkle the seasonings on the chicken straight without measuring.

Heading 3 - First step$\color {white}.$

I melted a little coconut oil in the microwave in order to brush it onto the chicken thighs which solidified almost immediately. The coconut oil is nice and sticky so the spices adhere perfectly and I think the coconut flavor compliments the indian spaces just wonderfully.

Foil on top of the chicken is crucial. $\color {white}.$

Once the pans are preheated I spray down a single sheet of aluminum foil with a little cooking spray and pull the pans from the oven. I didn’t get pictures of all of this as things move fast and everything is very hot. You can check out my Garlic Shrimp in White Wine Butter Sauce recipe to get another look at the double cast iron sear technique.

I lay the chicken thighs down in the pan and then cover with the sheet of foil so as to avoid the meat sticking to the bottom of the second pan.

I cooked these for about 8 minutes but it may take a few more or a few less depending on the temperature of your oven.

Random Pan Sauce$\color {white}.$

I had some demi-glace leftover from that duck I made as referecned in the post DUCK! and when I pulled the chicken off the pan the leftover fond looked so yummy that I just had to add a little and make a pan sauce. I also microplaned some garlic into the pan which you can see frothing away in the second image here. I scraped it all up with a wooden spoon an poured it over the chicken.