Cornflake baked chicken

My mother made a cornflake-coated baked chicken recipe that I remember liking as a child. Since I don’t know where in her welter of recipe clippings that might be hiding, or worse yet locked up in her fading memory, I thought I’d give this one a try.

Crispy-Coated Baked Chicken

Adapted from an Ellie Krieger recipe in the Star Tribune

Ingredients

1 cup plain low-fat yogurt

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

4 pieces bone-in chicken breast (or 8 thighs)

4 cups corn flakes

1½ teaspoon paprika

¾ teaspoon garlic powder

¼ teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon ground pepper

Method

Whisk together yogurt and mustard in a lidded dish. Add the chicken and turn to evenly coat. Marinate in the refrigerator for 1 to 4 hours.

In a food processor, combine corn flakes, paprika, garlic powder, salt and pepper until you reach the coarse crumb stage. Transfer half the mixture to a shallow dish. (You're likely to end up with leftover crumbs and you can save them for future use if they haven't been in the dipping bowl with the raw chicken.)

Press chicken pieces into crumb mixture. Place on nonstick baking pan (or grease a regular roasting pan with olive oil).

Bake for 45 (for thighs) to 55 (for breasts) minutes in a preheated 350 degree oven until chicken registers 165 degrees.

Rating: If you’ve got a go-to recipe for oven-fried chicken, keep making it. If you don’t, this is a perfectly fine place to start. The mustard in the marinade helps give it extra flavor. Perfectly moist inside and crispy outside. The recipe as printed called for spritzing the chicken with olive oil before baking, but a co-worker who also tried this recipe reported that made it soggy, so I don’t recommend doing so.

For the record, this is less greasy than Mom’s, although I don’t remember exactly what the procedure was that resulted in it being greasy. And like fried chicken, this made excellent cold leftovers.