ChefSteps is a team of chefs, writers, and food lovers who develop recipes, techniques, and guides to help people cook better at home.

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Memorial Day may be the official start of summer in the US, but we think grilling is the true herald of our favorite season—and that starts now! Hello shorts weather, barbecues, bonfires, and plenty of popsicles. We missed you. One hallmark of the season is inexpensive, accessible, flavorful chicken legs. But they can be tough to cook—and if you don’t cook them quite right, you’ll end up with seriously tough or undercooked chicken. A few years ago, we discovered that sous vide was a secret weapon to making juicy, tender grilled chicken with nary a stringy, overcooked, dried out bite in sight. Cooking the legs low-and-slow brings out their full potential. Leaving the grill for that <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/finishing">finishing touch</a> gives you meats that are perfectly cooked with all the crispy-skinned, charred glory of grilling.This summer, we set out to make this recipe even more accessible. So, whether you have a sous vide circulator or not, you can still make magical grilled chicken—using your oven! A high-performance precision oven like the <a href="https://www.breville.com/us/en/products/ovens/bov900.html?ecid=|ChefStepsContent||referral|||BOV900pdp|US|Oven|All||CTW||All|||||||">Breville Smart Oven® Air Fryer Pro</a> makes this easy, because it holds an accurate temperature and heats up quickly. If you don’t have a countertop oven, don’t worry! You can also achieve these amazing results in your normal home oven. The low-temperature roast and a tightly wrapped roasting pan produce the juiciest dark meat you’ve ever had. (And, seasoned with our special secret sauce, your chicken will have plenty of delicious smoky grill flavor.) Prebaking the legs also dries out the surface just enough so the chicken grills up faster and crispier. The upside to this oven method is that it keeps the chicken nice and flat for lots of level surface area for gorgeous grill marks and delicious char. Plus, compared to our <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/these-grilled-chicken-legs-are-pure-magic">sous vide version</a>, this chicken is ready in half the time, getting you to the grill—and the dinner table—even faster.