🌶️ What Makes This Recipe So Good
Spicy, savory, slightly-sweet gochujang is a staple of authentic Korean cooking. The beautifully-crimson paste is typically a blend of ingredients like Korean chili flakes or powder (known as gochugaru and made from dried red chile peppers), salt, sticky rice, and fermented soybeans. Gochujang has an unbelievable flavor depth that really makes this entire dish the mouth-watering recipe that it is! If this is your introduction to gochujang, well then, you are WELCOME. Since this is a sheet-pan meal, gochujang chicken is not only super easy to make, it’s even easier to clean up. The total cook time clocks in under an hour, making this a great dish for busy weeknights, “I forgot to thaw something else” nights, or even spur-of-the-moment entertaining! No mountain of dishes waiting for you after dinner, either. If you don’t have baby potatoes on hand, you can swap them out for any of your favorite veggies. Carrots, broccoli, butternut squash – they’d all work well here. You can also skip the veggies entirely and stick to just the chicken thighs, serving them with a bed of rice or tender noodles. Even lettuce cups would work well as long as you remove the chicken from the bone first!
👩🍳 Chef’s Tips
For a deeper flavor, and if you’ve got the prep time to spare, consider a marinade! Double the gochujang sauce and use it to marinate the chicken thighs for at least 30 minutes – though an hour would be better if you can swing it. If not, no worries. Even just 30 minutes would impart that much more flavor into the chicken itself. I like to marinate my food in a glass mixing bowl (or glass dish) with a lid, but a food-safe sealable plastic bag would also work well. Put the chicken and marinade in the fridge if you’re going longer than 30 minutes! Store-bought grated ginger would work fine, but I really prefer the flavor of ginger that’s freshly grated! It’s super easy to do, too. Just use a vegetable peeler or sharp knife to remove the papery skin. Once it’s peeled, grate the ginger using a handheld grater, or the small holes on a cheese grater. Just be careful not to get your fingers too close to the blades! I add a little freshly squeezed lime juice to my gochujang chicken and potatoes right before eating it, but you’re welcome to skip that part! To me, the citrusy lime juice amplifies the savory flavors in the gochujang sauce, making them that much more pronounced. The lime wedges add a nice pop of color to the final presentation, too!
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