3 Sheet Pan Dinners to Make Your Week Easier

I think we all know how an oven works for the most part,

but ovens have these mechanics

and these quirks and these different levels.

Your oven has racks.

The bottom rack is intense high heat.

It mimics frying almost.

The middle one is more even heat; that's for your roasting.

And the top one can either be super gentle,

or it can be really intense if you use that broiler.

I'm Jesse Szewczyk, and today I'm gonna be showing you

how to make three sheet pan dinners,

and each one shows you kind of a different trick

to utilize the quirks of your oven.

[funky upbeat music]

So the first recipe we're making today,

I've dubbed one big chicken Parm.

I was scrolling TikTok one night as we all do,

and someone named Chef Skyler came out.

Chef Skyler, insert here.

She made a giant chicken cutlet,

and I thought that was genius.

And I was working on this frico recipe,

which is like crispy Parmesan.

I'm like, Oh, chicken Parm makes sense.

So that's what we're making today.

So unlike most chicken Parm

that use, like, whole-muscle chickens,

like a chicken breast,

we're gonna be using ground chicken today.

If you were to make this giant chicken Parm

with chicken breasts,

first of all, you're gonna have to pound them so thin.

And then, second of all, chicken breasts can get dry

versus the super-thin ground chicken mixture.

It, like, is overcooked to begin with, but that's fine.

It's not a bad thing.

So that's why I like using ground chicken.

I'm going to roll this out, and you wanna roll it out

until it's about one to two inches from the sides.

So if you don't have a rolling pin,

you could use a wine bottle, you could use a vinegar bottle,

you could use your hands and just smack them.

So this looks good to me.

Kinda like a sticker,

you're gonna very carefully peel this off,

and then see now you have one big cutlet.

So then next we're just gonna season this:

salt and then some pepper.

I think the main perk of this recipe

is that you're not actually frying anything.

Chicken Parm is great, but, you know, if you're making,

I don't know, six cutlets, you're gonna be frying six times.

I'm not doing that on a weeknight.

So for this, you take out that whole cooking in batches.

It's like one and done.

So I'm gonna sprinkle some flour.

At this point, you can use a brush,

or you can use your hands,

and you're making just kind of a thin layer.

And this is to help everything adhere.

And this process is a bit of a mess, so just embrace it.

So we're gonna make our breadcrumb mixture.

I like to use Panko

because I think the texture is really nice.

It's, like, really nubbly.

And then this is Parmesan; this is finely grated Parmesan.

For this, I wouldn't recommend the shreddy kind,

nor would I actually recommend grating it yourself.

I mean, you can, but the shaky cheese,

the kinda like starches

or whatever they got going on in here,

it's nice, and it helps it crisp.

Big food sometimes works.

So the next step is we need glue to adhere the breadcrumbs.

So with any standard breading, we have eggs.

The cool lesson about this recipe

is that since we're not frying,

if you were to just put this in the oven, it would bake.

But since we're doing it on the bottom rack

at, like, a very high temperature,

it's essentially frying the bottom.

We're gonna spray this with oil; the cheese is oily,

and it's gonna be sizzling and frying

and mimic that, like, browning effect

that you get from frying.

So the next step

is we're just gonna kind of brush the egg on,

and then I just kinda paint it.

Now I'm just gonna shower in this breadcrumb

and cheese mixture.

I think the fun thing about this cutlet

is, you know, you just put the sheet pan out,

and that's dinner for...

I was gonna say four people, but I don't know, two people,

maybe four regular people, two of me.

So this is good.

And we want some fat on this to help promote frying,

to help promote browning, get it crispy.

You could totally drizzle olive oil; that's fine.

I just like spray.

I feel like it's very even.

You could do a light coating, not too heavy.

So I just kind of spray paint it.

[spray hissing]

We're gonna put a piece of parchment on top,

and we're gonna flip the whole thing in one swift motion.

There you go.

And then you just peel it off like a sticker.

Sometimes you just need to hold it down to get it started.

Same thing on the side, same exact process.

So this is not, you know, a 30-minute quick sheet pan meal,

but it's not intended to be.

This is fun.

It's something that's supposed to enjoy the physicality

and the steps and the quirks of it

and the drama of bringing out a giant chicken Parm.

This is the joy of cooking part,

not the indifference of cooking.

So that's that.

I'm gonna pop this into the oven at 425

with a rack position at the very lowest position.

And this is gonna just mimic that really intense high heat,

as if the bottom is frying.

So an oven, for the most part,

the heating element is on the bottom.

So if you use the bottom rack,

it is the closest to the direct intense heat.

And you can kind of think of that

as, like, cooking over high heat.

So really keep in mind anything

that you want that bottom to be crispy and brown,

position the rack in the bottom; it's really gonna pay off.

So at this point, I'm gonna flip the whole thing

so then both sides get the opportunity

to benefit from that direct heat on the bottom.

Like regular chicken Parm, I'm gonna go into my sauce.

You can make your sauce,

but you could also save yourself time,

make this quick and easy, and just buy a jar of sauce.

I do wanna preserve a bit of crust,

almost like you're making a pizza,

just 'cause I think it's really beautiful

to see the cutlet underneath.

So the second bake,

we're really just aiming for the cheese to melt

and the cheese to brown just a little bit.

So much shorter bake time, about 15 minutes.

Okay, this looks perfect.

I feel like this is like a centerpiece.

I don't need to put on a platter unless I want to.

It's perfectly beautiful as is.

Okay, you can feel how crispy it is.

That's wonderful.

Okay, this is the moment.

Let's see.

Yes.

Perfect.

You see how it's so thin, and it's golden on both sides.

This looks like a cutlet that's fried in a pan,

and that's kind of the power

of utilizing the bottom rack of the oven.

It can give you this crispy-on-both-sides texture.

I'm gonna eat this.

I'm just gonna eat it like pizza, like a heathen.

So...

[laughs] That's good.

It is crunchy.

It is perfectly cheesy.

If I ate this, I'd be like,

This is chicken Parm made in a skillet.

This is a great recipe that really showcases the power

of using that bottom rack,

but the next recipe we're gonna do in the middle rack,

and this is maybe more of, like, a simple

throw everything on sheet pan dinner.

So let's get into that.

[groovy upbeat music]

So this is gnocchi,

and this is shelf-stable gnocchi, not the fresh stuff.

So the difference between a shelf-stable gnocchi

and, say, a fresh one is that the fresh ones,

they have a lot more moisture.

They're meant to be cooked

in the prescribed fashion by boiling.

And these, you can tell they're, like, dry,

and they're very resilient.

So for this kind of cooking,

where you're cooking in the oven

exposed to direct dry heat, this is what we want.

We have olive oil.

This is a third of a cup.

The oil is doing a few things.

First, it's coating everything,

and then that's just gonna make the heat of the oven

kind of transfer easier and brown.

If I were to roast this with not enough oil,

they'll start to get leathery.

They'll start to dry out a bit.

But if you really kind of lubricate them in oil,

you're gonna get crispiness, not dryness.

So I'm thinly slicing my onions

and then kind of breaking them apart.

I find when they're thinly sliced,

they kind of fry in the oil into nothingness.

They just, like, infuse the dish

with these little frizzled onion bits, which is really nice.

And then some garlic.

And I honestly like to just microplane my garlic.

Primarily 'cause I'm lazy,

but second of all, I think that the small bits

coat everything really beautifully.

A microplane is definitely one of my favorite kitchen tools,

that and an offset spatula.

That's all you need, really.

Everything else you can use your hands.

That's, like, definitely not true.

But you might notice that I have not covered this

or lined this with anything either.

If you have a sheet tray that's clean enough,

it's not completely banged up, you can utilize the metal

because it transfers heat very easily.

So see these bits of food that are touching the pan;

those are going to brown and kind of fry a bit.

So you don't actually want to line this with a non-stick mat

or a piece of parchment or anything.

Next thing is, I'm just gonna zest two lemons.

So the zest I'm adding now,

the fat is infused with the oil from the lemon.

The heat kind of unlocks all of its flavor,

and the juice I'm gonna bring in later;

I'm gonna cut those up, so don't throw them away.

And then last thing is just salt and pepper, of course.

I want everything to be evenly coated here.

My main flag here is since you grated the garlic,

it has a tendency to wanna stay together

in, like, little clumps.

So just make sure you really break those up,

and make sure the gnocchi is also thoroughly coated

'cause it's gonna suck up all that oil,

and you really wanna help them get crispy,

and this just gives them the best chance to get there.

So at this point, I'm gonna bring in the last ingredient,

which is spicy Italian sausage,

and then I break it up, and I just throw it on.

This sausage is going to render its kind of red-tinted fat.

It's spice-tinted fat all over everything.

So it's actually gonna fry in the sausage fat

and infuse that flavor in everything,

which is really beautiful.

We're going to put this in the oven, and for this recipe,

I positioned a rack in the middle of the oven.

What that's gonna do it's gonna be even, consistent heat.

It's not gonna blast the bottom.

It's not too gentle.

It's not gonna blast the top,

and that's exactly what we want.

And then the final ingredient,

which I think is truly the star of the show,

is broccoli rabe.

This is a very bitter ingredient.

If I were to eat this now, it would taste vaguely poisonous,

but I think people just don't know how to treat it

or know what to do with it.

Oftentimes, broccoli rabe is blanched.

This application is roasting it,

so it's really celebrating that bitterness.

I think this just makes the dish so unique and so cravable.

Okay, this looks lovely.

You can look at the sausage, and it's perfectly golden.

It's sizzling.

It has rendered its fat.

The gnocchi has sucked up that fat.

Now I'm gonna add the broccoli rabe.

I didn't wanna add this in the beginning.

If I added this in the beginning with everything else,

your broccoli rabe would turn out dry and leathery

and just cook into nothingness.

This is a trap that sheet tray dinners

often guide readers to,

and that's just not really the reality of cooking.

Sometimes you do need to layer and stagger your ingredients,

cook something first, take the sheet tray out,

put your more delicate things on.

And if you work this way,

you can kind of create your own recipes.

So this is good to go.

We're gonna put this back in the oven

just until the broccoli rabe is tender;

it's wilted a little bit.

So keep a close eye on it.

Okay, I'm cutting it here.

This is beautiful.

If you look at the gnocchi,

this is really fun because it's golden.

It almost has this, like, crust on it

as though it was pan-fried, which is exactly what I want

because I can tell, you know, it's nice and bouncy

and soft on the inside, but crispy on the outside.

So it's like a really fun texture

you don't typically get with gnocchi.

I'm just serving this on the tray,

and then I do a showering of Parm.

I'm so excited to taste this.

It's so good.

The sausage is perfectly rendered.

The broccoli rabe is like the perfect bitterness.

The gnocchi is so nice.

It's like imagine a crouton meets a gnocchi,

and it has kinda this chewy bounciness

like a rice cake does.

This is, like, all the best qualities of sheet tray dinners

distilled into one actually delicious recipe.

If you thought this was easy, my next recipe is even easier,

and it's utilizing the top rack of the oven.

It is my sheet pan shawarma spice chicken.

You can make a sheet tray dinner entirely using the broiler,

fast and aggressive, mimicking direct flames

or, like a grill,

or, in this case, mimicking the outside char of shawarma.

So we're gonna do that.

So shawarma is a popular street food in the Middle East.

It was originating from the Levant

during the Ottoman Empire.

So this is obviously in no way, shape, or form

a traditional shawarma,

but it's utilizing some of those same warm spices

and making just a very quick dinner

that has all that smoky, charred flavors

as if it was cooked on a spit, but it's cooked in your oven.

We're just gonna cut this into chunks.

So the broiler is magic

because it gives you enough direct heat

to truly transform and burn your ingredients.

So the sugars caramelize,

it goes through the Maillard reaction,

you've heard a million times how beautiful that is,

and it creates this flavor that does not exist

outside of the Maillard reaction.

It's, like, deeply smoky and charred

and a deep savoriness that you can't get from anything else.

Of course, you can use, like, smoked paprika

and things like that, but it's not the same.

So onion's done, throw it into a bowl.

We're gonna put some oil in.

So for the spices, obviously this is not shawarma,

and my intention was to simply honor shawarma

and capture, you know, that deliciousness,

but you can kind of tweak them as you please.

You can probably find a spice blend

and use that if you wanted.

And then the last thing, chicken thighs.

These are boneless, skinless chicken thighs.

I would not recommend using chicken breasts here.

Chicken breasts, first of all, they're really thick,

the scary store-bought ones, you know, the giant ones,

and a broiler is maybe not

the best cooking method for those.

I fear that the outside will be charred

before the interior is fully cooked.

Or if you have nice thin ones,

I also fear that the chicken might overcook

before you get the amount of char.

For this recipe, you know, the char is the star.

You can cook thighs and keep cooking thighs and cook them.

And I honestly think they're delicious when overcooked,

so use thighs.

At this point, I recommend fan them out

because you want to expose the chicken

to as much surface area as you can to promote browning.

So that's the recipe.

We're gonna go in the oven.

I have the broiler set to high,

and I have the oven rack on the top position.

Some broilers you can do high or low.

Frankly, I don't know what the purpose of low is.

If I'm broiling, I want it to be intense.

I want slamming heat.

I really wanna hammer it hard.

I want it to burn, so I just cranked everything up

to the most intense positions that I could.

It's gonna go in, and as soon as that top is nice

and beautifully burnt, I'm gonna flip them.

I think people think of sheet tray dinners

as slow, leisurely roasts,

but using the broiler mimics the direct, intense heat

that shawarma used on that rotating spit,

so it gets nice and burnt and charred,

and you get those smoky flavors.

So I pop the chicken in, and I have just enough time

to prep everything else for the recipe.

The chicken cooks so fast,

so I have just enough time to get this ready.

And you can essentially serve this with whatever you want,

but I like making this very quick yogurt sauce,

and I'll just give this a stir.

I would say use a whisk for this 'cause I look like a fool.

And I'm gonna go ahead and plate a little bit of this up,

and then I'm gonna go in and prep my veggies.

Before we cut these tomatoes,

I'm gonna check on the chicken.

I think it might be time to flip it.

Okay, this is exactly what we want.

We're picking up beautiful char on the chicken,

and you see over here these onions are getting dark.

There you go.

Now it's protected.

Just kinda tuck them in, cover them up by the chicken,

and it's gonna be fine.

And burning, you know, burning is the goal here.

Burning is the primary flavor source.

Obviously, we have the spices,

we have the chicken and the salt, that's all great things,

and the onions, but the real flavor, the depth here,

the kind of thing that you cannot define,

is so delicious, is the burn.

So let it burn.

Be patient.

We're gonna go back in until this side burns,

until the onions are, like, nice, deeply brown and jammy.

So one more time.

Okay, we're back.

We're cutting tomatoes.

I'm using heirloom tomatoes here

because I was lucky that the culinary producer

procured these for me, and they're beautiful,

but you can use any tomato you want,

and I just kind of toss it on here.

So the key to cooking entirely with the broiler

is to really keep a close eye on it.

Not quite.

[groovy light music]

[film crew member laughs]

Okay, it's not ready.

It lied. [beeps]

The moment you stop watching it is the moment that your food

goes from perfectly charred to absolute charcoal.

I would say check it every minute or so.

Don't walk away.

Don't go to the bathroom.

Your smoke alarm will be going off.

Baby it, keep a close eye, but also be fearless.

Sounds great.

So I know what you might be thinking.

This is burnt, and you're right, it is burnt,

but this is the protein that you should burn,

and that goes back to the resilience of the ingredients.

Knowing where to position things in the oven

and how to cook them really relates to that.

But onions and chicken thighs,

even when they're burnt, they're delicious.

In fact, that's more delicious.

So, just keeping in mind

how far can I push certain ingredients

and how gentle do I have to be with other ones?

So at this point, I'm going to slice this,

and I'm gonna plate it.

I think this is a proper family meal.

I mean, this is a pile of meat with vegetables.

Like, this is generous.

I would be so happy.

So when it comes to eating this,

it's a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure at this point.

This would be delicious over rice.

I like to kinda make little sandwiches,

little pitas with it.

I'm so excited to eat this. [munching]

This is really lovely.

I love, like, the warm chicken, the warm pita,

against the cold tomatoes, the cold yogurts.

It's kind of just a beautiful collection

of contrasting things in this perfect sandwich.

I think that this recipe is a great example

of kind of like re-contextualizing

what a sheet pan dinner is.

It's really showcasing that if you know how to use your oven

and, like, you think of the nuances

of the mechanics behind it,

you can make some really fun stuff.

[funky upbeat music]

Sheet pan dinners are simple,

but they don't have to be simplistic.

They can be fun and delicious and have texture,

and learning how to utilize your oven

and these different racks,

and keeping all these tips in mind,

you can remix these recipes, take things from them,

and learn how to make sheet pan dinners

that are just as good as your million pots

and pan dinners at home in a fraction of the effort.

[groovy upbeat music]