Gordon Ramsay's Go-To Technique For Perfectly Cooked Bone-In Chicken Thighs

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Do you ever find yourself intimidated by chicken? Many people do and chicken anxiety is a real thing you can find online. There are plenty of videos and articles about the pervasive fear people have about preparing chicken the wrong way. No one wants undercooked chicken, but we seem to have reached a point where the fear of salmonella and other foodborne illnesses is creating undue stress. Luckily, Gordon Ramsay has a tip for perfectly cooking chicken thighs so you don't have to worry about pink meat around the bones again.

Ramsay shared a quick tip on Instagram, offering a simple but effective way to make sure your bone-in chicken thighs are cooked all the way through. The famous chef demonstrated how to use a paring knife to pierce the underside of the thighs several times so the tip goes through the meat. He's not piercing the skin side, but the flesh side, with just a few punctures across each piece.

As Ramsay explains, if you're worried about the meat being pink around the bone, the punctures help ensure thorough cooking. When the chicken sears, the holes from the knife allow the heat to reach the bone, rather than radiating up through the tissue as it normally would. Basically, it's a shortcut to ensure full cooking deeper into the meat than normal.

Pink chicken does not always mean raw chicken, which is why eyeballing your meat isn't a surefire way to test for doneness. If the chicken is younger, the bones may not have fully formed and that can lead to discoloration in the meat even when it is fully cooked. There's no safety issue at all with eating it, but the aesthetics can throw people off.

The best way to tell if your chicken is done is to check the temperature. Chicken must reach a minimum temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit all the way through for it to be safe to eat. Buying a digital thermometer will go a long way to reassure you that your meat is done. Once you've reached that temperature, the pink around the bones does not matter. That pink could be from the bones in younger chickens, or fat breaking away from the skin in older chickens. Even the diet of a chicken can affect the color of its meat. So a visual test won't be an accurate one.

Ramsay's tip goes hand in hand with proper cooking techniques by ensuring the chicken reaches the right temperature. Give his trick a try and you can enjoy a delicious bite and some extra peace of mind. Then you can get cracking on a whole assortment of tasty chicken thigh recipes. Another good tip for chicken thighs is to cook them more slowly. Our recipe for juicy garlic butter chicken thighs starts them off on the stove top and finishes them in the oven. And if Ramsay has reassured you about cooking chicken, find out more of the chef's tips for other recipes, too.