8 Easy And Delicious Chicken Drumstick Recipes

Chicken parts go in and out of fashion, just like any other type of food. At one point, everyone was all about breasts, while wings have certainly had their day (it comes once a year and it's called the Super Bowl). Not, it seems, everyone's all about thighs, with dark meat fans raving about how juicy and flavorful they are. The other half of the leg, while it tastes just the same, doesn't seem to get quite as much attention. When, oh when, will drumsticks become the flavor of the month? Perhaps it's for the best that they remain the dark horse of dark meats since that tends to keep their price lower than that of other, more popular chicken parts.

If you've scored a great deal on drumsticks, congrats, but now what will you do with them? Pretty much anything you'd do with any other type of chicken since most parts (aside from livers and gizzards and stuff) tend to be fairly interchangeable with maybe a few minor tweaks to the cooking time. The following list, however, includes dishes designed with drumsticks in mind. This selection of recipes will allow you to show your chicken legs some lovin' from the oven ... or the stovetop, deep fryer, or air fryer.

These easy oven-baked drumsticks are given some Greek-inspired flavor with a combination of lemon juice, garlic, and oregano (with a little thyme thrown in for good measure). A Greek salad with chunks of feta and kalamata olives would be the perfect accompaniment, while you could echo the lemon flavor with a bowl of avgolemono soup as an appetizer. Add some baklava for dessert, and your meal will have you singing "Mamma Mia, here we go again!" (Okay, so Abba was Swedish, but the movies were set in Greece.)

Recipe: Easy Baked Lemon Chicken

What kind of lollipop would five out of five dentists recommend? A chicken lollipop! These toothsome sticky-sauced drumsticks make for a cute party appetizer since the lollipop treatment (which involves pushing all the meat down to one end of the bone) makes them much less messy than standard barbecued chicken legs. One more thing that we love about this dish is that the lollipops taste just as good cold as they do when they're fresh from the oven.

Recipe: BBQ Chicken Lollipops

Some chicken curry recipes can be complicated affairs involving lengthy lists of potentially hard-to-obtain ingredients, but this isn't one of them. True to its name, this easy curry requires just five minutes of prep time and seven different ingredients — in addition to the drumsticks, you'll be using coconut milk and chicken broth to make a sauce and flavoring it with crushed red pepper and curry powder. (The other two ingredients, oil and salt, fall under the "functional" heading.)

Recipe: Easy Chicken Curry

This chicken adobo recipe is a simplified version of a dish that is well-known in the Philippines, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Our one-pot version is made with chicken drumsticks cooked in a sauce that, like our easy chicken curry, has a base made of canned coconut milk. Instead of being seasoned with red pepper and curry, however, this chicken gets its flavor from rice vinegar, soy sauce, and sugar.

Recipe: Best Chicken Adobo

If you're only looking to cook a small batch of chicken legs at a time — say, half a dozen or so — you might want to use your air fryer instead of your oven. An air fryer is pretty much just a miniature convection oven, but its compact size can allow it to cook your food more quickly. Admittedly, the taste is more baked than fried, but there's nothing wrong with that, especially when the legs in question are spiced with a southwestern-inspired blend of powdered chiles, cumin, oregano, garlic, and brown sugar.

Recipe: Southwest-Spiced Air Fryer Chicken Legs

Sometimes "air-fried" or "oven-fried" chicken just won't do, though. After all, the real definition of frying means to cook in hot fat. It may not be the healthiest way to prepare chicken, but nothing tastes quite so finger-lickin' good (as a certain soi-disant Kentucky colonel would put it). What makes this particular fried chicken extra-special, besides the fact that it's made with drumsticks, is the seasoning blend of cayenne, garlic, onion, oregano, paprika, and turmeric.

Recipe: Crispy Fried Chicken

While many fried chicken recipes call for dipping the chicken in buttermilk, Nigella Lawson instead uses this ingredient to marinate drumsticks that she roasts in the oven. Our version of Lawson's buttermilk chicken recipe goes the TV chef one better by adding potatoes and olives to the dish, thus transforming a simple entree into a one-pan meal complete with a starchy side and green garnish.

Recipe: Nigella Lawson's Buttermilk Chicken With A Twist

You can never have too many fried chicken recipes, so here's another one. This dish, as the name implies, was inspired by a fictional chicken chain featured in the sequel to "Breaking Bad." While the chicken doesn't contain any suspicious substances, the batter is flavored with tequila. The finished product is sprinkled with a zesty blend of annatto, chicken bouillon, chiles, cumin, garlic, lime zest, and onion.

Recipe: Better Call Saul-Inspired Los Pollos Hermanos Chicken