‘The Pioneer Woman’: Ree Drummond Shares the Secret to Perfect Homemade Chicken Nuggets
Ree Drummond has mastered kid-friendly homemade chicken nuggets and has a little secret to making them perfectly crispy. The Pioneer Woman star shared her simple hack for the easy recipe.
Ree Drummond perfected her chicken nuggets recipe
Drummond had a crew of kids to feed when they all lived at home so she definitely made a lot of chicken nuggets in her life.
She demonstrated how to make her chicken nuggets recipe on an episode of The Pioneer Woman. “As soon as I started having kids, I realized something — I needed food I could make that was fast that the kids would love but that Ladd and I would love because, invariably, it’s our dinner too,” she explained.
Drummond continued, “Anyone with kids in their house knows what I mean. So the defining dinner — chicken nuggets.”
The Food Network host admitted she has made them more times than she can count. “I can’t tell you how many I’ve made since I became a mother years ago and I tell you, I don’t regret a single one of them,” Drummond noted.
‘The Pioneer Woman’ star shared the secret to perfect chicken nuggets
Drummond shared her easy system for breading the nuggets and a simple trick for the best results. “Making your own chicken nuggets is not difficult at all,” she said. “You just have to get a few ingredients ready.”
The Pioneer Woman star added flour, seasoned salt, salt, and pepper to a ziplock bag, placed bite-sized pieces of chicken breast in the bag, sealed it, and coated the chicken.
She made an egg wash by combining eggs and water in one bowl and added seasoned bread crumbs to another bowl.
Drummond took the chicken pieces and dipped them in the egg wash, then coated them in the breadcrumbs. “I always bread the chicken in batches,” she explained. “If you try to throw all of it in at once you’ll just have a big clumpy gloopy mess. It’s a little bit messy anyway so you need all the help you can get.”
Once breaded, she added the chicken to a skillet with hot oil. She pointed out her secret for perfect chicken nuggets: the small chicken pieces. “This is about as big as I like the nuggets,” she explained. “If you get too big, it’s hard to cook the chicken all the way through before the breading gets done.”
Drummond added, “So it’s a nice balancing act. You want to have the chicken small enough that it’ll cook all the way through.”
She turned the chicken over after the first side was golden, then reduced the heat and cooked the other side.
Drummond’s kid-friendly meal isn’t fancy but it’s a family favorite
Drummond removed the chicken and placed it on a paper towel-lined sheet pan before she put it on a plate. She served a simple dipping condiment on the side: ketchup.
“This is the benefit of starting with really small pieces of chicken — it doesn’t take long to cook,” she explained. “When you’ve got hungry kids and a hungry husband and sometimes a hungry basset hound, you don’t want dinner to take too long.”
“They’re not fancy at all but my family absolutely loves them,” she said of the Drummond family favorite. “This is the dinner that defined what I like to call ‘the chicken nugget years.’”
