Without going into too many details, I recently found myself with a hearty supply of sweet ‘n’ sour sauce from McDonald’s (don’t ask) that were in desperate need of some chicken nugs for dipping. But McDonald’s nugs (though delicious) make me feel absolutely terrible and I only eat them in extreme situations. And after a bbq the day before full of smoked sausages and wings, I frankly wasn’t in the mood to eat anything fried, let alone do any frying.

But those nugs. I needed those chicken nugs dipped in sweet sweet not that sour sauce. So I decided to bake some. Wasn’t going to write a blog post or anything, just wanted to eat some tasty nugs. And then a weird thing happened. I googled “baked chicken nuggets” and a bunch of recipes came up, the first being from Martha Stewart. Looked fine, but it had parmesan cheese in the crust, and I don’t care who you are that does NOT go with sweet ‘n’ sour sauce. So I moved on to the next one; also parmesan. Then another. Then ANOTHER. The first EIGHT recipes I looked at all had parmesan in the crust. Then I looked a little closer, and, well, they were mostly the same recipe, with only slight variations. Guys, don’t rip off Martha Stewart’s website for content for your blog. Not cool.

So basically, I am giving you a baked chicken nugget recipe that is not taken from Martha’s website, and also doesn’t have parmesan so you can go ham on some delicious sauces that may not be cheese-friendly (PS for the record there are plenty of baked chicken nugget recipes out there that aren’t strikingly similar to Martha’s and don’t have cheese in the crust, but they all seem to have some gluten free or dairy free angle or whatever that we’re not going to do here).

Ingredients (makes a party-sized pile of nugs)

• 2 lbs boneless skinless chicken breast
• 3 eggs beaten with 2 T water

Seasoned Flour

• 3 c all-purpose flour
• 2 T garlic powder
• 2 Tonion powder
• 1 t cayenne pepper
• 2 T salt
• black pepper

Bread Crumbs

• 6 slices sourdough bread
• 2 T garlic powder
• 2 Tonion powder
• 1 t cayenne pepper
• 2 T salt
• black pepper

Directions

• Preheat your oven to 375 F
• Cut the bread into small pieces and toast in the oven for 20-30 minutes, or until golden brown (definitely don’t make these too dark as they’re going to cook again)
• Cut the chicken breasts into nugget sized pieces; try to make them all roughly the same size so they cook evenly.
• Mix your seasoned flour together.
• Once the bread is feeling nice and dry, take it out and grind it up into bread crumbs.
• Mix the bread crumbs with the seasoning.
• Dip the chicken bits in flour, egg wash, then bread crumbs, and place on the rack of a roasting pan.
• Repeat until you’ve filled 2 roasting pans. (If you don’t ahve roasting pans with racks, a normal baking dish or sheet is fine, but you’ll want to flip the nugs halfway through).
• Cook the nuggets in the oven for ~40 minutes; cut into the biggest looking one to make sure they’re done.
• Nug out!