Serves 4
For a milder dish, use one seeded chile. If you prefer your food very hot, use up to all three chiles including their seeds and ribs. Scotch bonnet chiles can be used in place of the habaneros. Wear gloves when working with the chiles.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
Traditional Jamaican jerk recipes rely on island ingredients for both marinade and cooking technique. Fortunately, we were able to achieve the characteristic spicy-sweet-fresh-smoky balance with the right combination of stateside staples. Keeping the marinade paste-like and cooking the meat first over indirect heat prevented the jerk flavors from dripping or peeling off during grilling. Enhancing our hickory chip packet with a few spice-cabinet ingredients allowed our jerk chicken recipe to mimic the unique smoke of authentic pimento wood.

Serves 4

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
To cut down on the cooking time for our Roast Chicken Pita Panini with Cucumber-Olive Salad, we used a whole, cooked rotisserie chicken instead of cooking the chicken ourselves. Weighing down the sandwiches with a Dutch oven created a makeshift panini press. For easy cleanup, we covered the bottom of the Dutch oven with aluminum foil.

Serves 4

A whole 4-pound chicken, cut into 8 pieces, can be used instead of the chicken parts. Skinless chicken pieces are also an acceptable substitute, but the meat will come out slightly drier. A Dutch oven with an 11-inch diameter can be used in place of the straight-sided sauté pan.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
Crackling-crisp, golden-brown, and juicy—what’s not to love about fried chicken? In a word, frying. Heating—and then cleaning up—more than a quart of fat on the stovetop is more trouble than most home cooks care to bother with. We wanted to find a way to prepare fried chicken—golden brown and crisp with a buttermilk- and flour-based coating—without having to heat up a pot full of fat.

To season the meat and ensure it turned out juicy, we soaked chicken parts in a buttermilk brine (buttermilk heavily seasoned with salt). We also incorporated baking powder, an unconventional ingredient in fried chicken, into our dredging mixture (flour seasoned with garlic powder, paprika, and cayenne pepper). As the chicken fries, the baking powder releases carbon dioxide gas, leavening the crust and increasing its surface area, keeping it light and crisp. And while most dredging mixtures contain purely dry ingredients, we added a little buttermilk to our mixture because the small clumps of batter it forms turn ultra-crisp once fried.

To streamline frying the chicken, we turned to a hybrid method where we fried the chicken until just lightly browned on both sides in less than half the amount of oil we’d typically use. Then we transferred the chicken to a wire rack set over a baking sheet and slid it into the oven to finish cooking through. Setting the chicken on a rack promoted air circulation all around the meat for an evenly crisp crust. And with a lot less oil to deal with post-frying, cleanup was a breeze.

Serves 4 to 6

To help prevent the filling from leaking, use large, 8-ounce chicken breasts and thoroughly chill the stuffed breasts before breading. We like Black Forest ham here.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
Our goal was a Foolproof Chicken Cordon Bleu recipe that would be worth making. We found cutting a pocket into the breast to be much more efficient than the traditional method of pounding and rolling. To get the same swirl effect achieved by rolling the chicken around the ham and cheese, we simply rolled the ham slices into cylinders around shredded cheese and tucked the cylinders into each chicken breast. Adding a healthy dose of Dijon mustard to the egg wash boosted the flavor of our Chicken Cordon Bleu recipe, as did ditching store-bought bread crumbs in favor of homemade.

Serves 8

To crush the corn flakes, place them inside a plastic bag and use a rolling pin to break them into pieces no smaller than 1/2 inch.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
We marinated our Oven-Fried Chicken in highly seasoned buttermilk flavored with mustard, garlic powder, black pepper, and hot pepper sauce. Soaking the chicken for at least one hour, or even better, overnight, allowed the flavors to penetrate deep into the meat. For the coating, we used a blend of corn flakes and bread crumbs. Seasoned heavily with spices and lightly coated with oil, the coating baked up as crisp as a deep-fried crust.

We baked the chicken in a hot oven on a wire rack set on a baking sheet. The rack allowed hot air to circulate beneath the chicken, ensuring that all sides of the pieces became crisp. Traditional homemade fried chicken has 552 calories, 34 grams of fat, and 10 grams of saturated fat per serving. Cook’s Country Oven-Fried Chicken has 216 calories, 9 grams of fat, and 4 grams of saturated fat per serving.

SERVES 4 AS A MAIN DISH OR 6 AS AN APPETIZER

To make an entrée, serve this dish with steamed white rice.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
This dish, popularized by chain restaurants like P.F. Chang’s and the Cheesecake Factory, is based on a Cantonese dish called sung choy bao. Most recipes for this dish suffer from a similar fate—stringy, tasteless meat drowned in a bland sauce. To remedy this, we started with flavorful chicken thighs and marinated them in soy sauce and rice wine. To keep the meat from drying out when stir-fried, we coated it in a velvetizing cornstarch slurry, which helped it retain moisture as it cooked.

Serves 6

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
Cooking canned pinto beans for our Chicken Tostadas with Spicy Cabbage Slaw in a skillet along with some of the juice from the can gave them a creamy texture similar to refried beans. Tasters preferred queso fresco—a fresh, soft Mexican cheese available in many markets—in our Chicken Tostadas with Spicy Cabbage Slaw; however, we found we could use crumbled feta cheese instead. To save time we went with a bag of coleslaw mix instead of making the slaw from scratch. Using jarred jalapeños allowed us to add some of the brine to flavor the tostada filling as well as the slaw.

Serves 4

Use any combination of white and dark meat. For even cooking, halve breasts crosswise and separate leg quarters into thighs and drumsticks. Reduced-fat sour cream can be used in this recipe. We like to serve this chicken over egg noodles or rice.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
Bone-in, skin-on chicken pieces gave our Chicken Paprikash the best flavor of all the possibilities we tested. If left on, the skin imparted an unwelcome greasiness to the sauce. We easily remedied this by discarding the skin after browning the chicken.

We discovered that not all vegetables were right for this dish. Some were slimy, others added too much bulk, and many detracted from the sweetness of the paprika. Caramelized onions and red bell peppers worked best. We really needed to pile on the paprika before it became noticeable in our Chicken Paprikash. But in large quantities it tasted harsh and gritty. A bit of tomato paste offset the bitterness of the paprika while allowing us to include enough of the spice to do justice to the dish’s namesake.

Serves 3 to 4

Try not to purchase heads of garlic that contain enormous cloves; if unavoidable, increase the foil-covered baking time to 40 to 45 minutes so that the largest cloves soften fully. A large Dutch oven can be used in place of a skillet, if you prefer. Broiling the chicken for a few minutes at the end of cooking crisps the skin, but this step is optional. Serve the dish with slices of crusty baguette for dipping into the sauce and onto which the roasted garlic cloves can be spread.

Serves 4 to 6

We prefer the flavor and texture of chunky peanut butter in the sauce; in particular, we like conventional chunky peanut butter because it tends to be sweeter than natural or old-fashioned versions.