Instant Pot Lemon Garlic Chicken

This instant pot lemon garlic chicken is the perfect weeknight dinner because it comes together fast and is incredibly delicious. I'm Justin from Cooking with Coit. I specialize in clean comfort cooking. And remember if you love this video make sure you hit those like and subscribe buttons. Let's get started. Let's first go over all the ingredients you need to make this recipe. Chicken thighs, butter, onion, garlic, lemon, paprika, garlic powder, Italian seasoning, chicken broth, olive oil, and salt and pepper. And the only piece of special cooking equipment you need for this recipe is an instant pot. First thing I'm going to do is to prep my garlic and onion. This is a half an onion. My recipe calls for a half an onion. I actually had already cut this from the last recipe I did so I'm just reusing it again so that I don't waste food. So half an onion. Next we're going to mince up three cloves of garlic. Next thing we're going to do is to prep our chicken thighs. So the first thing I like to do with these is to cut any extra excess pieces of fat. I like to just cut those off with some kitchen scissors. Next thing I like to do is to take some paper towels and to blot up as much moisture as you can from the chicken itself. I like to also do the undersides of the chicken thighs as well. Having too much moisture on the chicken is really going to not give you the best sear and with this recipe we want to get a good sear on the chicken. Now we're going to be making the seasoning for the chicken. We're going to first start with one teaspoon of garlic powder, one teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon of paprika, and a half a teaspoon of black pepper. Let's just give this a good mix. All right guys so now I'm going to transfer these chicken thighs into a medium size mixing bowl and then from here we're going to season it. So let's take out the seasoning that we just made and we're just going to sprinkle it all over these chicken thighs. We just want to try to get each thigh coated as much as we can and especially the underside. Make sure you get the underside of the thighs as well. All right guys so now we're going to be working in the Instant Pot. First thing you need to do is to turn it on to the brown function. So if you guys have an Instant Pot brand Instant Pot then you probably won't have the brown function. This is a multi-cooker that actually does have the brown function. If yours doesn't just put it on saute mode but for anyone that has a brown function put it on brown because I think that gives you a little bit of a higher temp and it's going to allow the chicken to get a little crispier. So next thing we're going to do is to add some olive oil. You can just put in about a tablespoon. And one other note that I had for you guys is as you probably noticed on the recipe on my website asked for six to eight chicken thighs. This is only four because I didn't think I'd be eating more than that today and I didn't want to waste food. So typically if you're going to make the full recipe that's going to be six to eight and given the size of this multi-cooker or your Instant Pot you're probably not going to be able to brown all of those six to eight chicken thighs at one time. So work in batches. All right so now we're going to add these chicken thighs into the pot. I'm doing skin side down to start and we're going to let these brown for just about two minutes per side. The question I've been getting a lot lately is should I buy an Instant Pot or should I buy an Air Fryer? And I have to be honest they are two completely different tools and really serve two completely different purposes. An Air Fryer is really good at making things crispy whereas an Instant Pot is really good at pressure cooking and breaking down protein and breaking down veggies for like soups and stews. All right guys so these chicken thighs have been browning for about two minutes on the skin side down. Let me flip them over and show you how the progress is looking. Oh yes okay this is beautiful browning and this is exactly what we're looking for. So just flip them over and now we're going to give them two minutes on the other side. All right guys so these chicken thighs are totally browned and beautiful now. So now I'm going to take them out set them on a plate and just set them aside for a minute and I want to show you guys just how beautiful these came out. Check that out. All right guys so now we need to switch into our saute mode so just hit the saute function hit start and then now we're going to be cooking our onions and garlic. So we first just dump in the onion straight away and so what's going to be happening here is that because we brown the chicken first we've got all of that amazing flavor from the fat of the chicken that has now sort of cooked into the pot. So what we are doing is we're cooking essentially we're cooking the onions in that same chicken fat and I know it sounds a little weird to say out loud but it's going to give us such great flavor. So this is a really smart way to go about it. I'm also going to be adding one tablespoon of butter. So guys I need to be honest here I should have put in the butter and melted it before I did put in the onions but I forgot so forgive me. It's going to work out just the same so no worries. Now I'm going to be adding the garlic just toss it right in. We're going to allow this onion and garlic to cook for just about three to four minutes until the onion has turned slightly translucent. All right guys so the next thing we're going to do is to add our lemon juice. My recipe calls for the juice of one lemon. So just sprinkle that in there. Lemon juice is going to do two things in this recipe. First it's going to give us that little bit of acidy you know citrus flavor but it's also going to deglaze the pot and next we're going to be adding in the tablespoon of our Italian seasoning and that seasoning has really great hits of like rosemary, thyme, and oregano. You could really make your own Italian seasoning if you needed to. I'm sure you could look up a recipe online but it's kind of easy and nice if you can buy it at the store as well. So just give this a mix and we're just going to let this cook for you know just about a minute. We definitely don't want to let the Italian seasoning start to burn. Now it is time to add the chicken thighs back into the pot. I like to do it skin side up. Just place these guys right in the bottom of the pot. You really don't need to give them too much breathing room. It's fine and if you had six to eight chicken thighs as per what my recipe calls for you don't need to be worried about having them all in a single layer. They can stack on top of each other a little bit. I'm actually going to turn off the saute function at this point and I'm going to add my third of a cup of chicken broth. Let me just give this a little bit of a mix around and now we are going to take the lid and pop it on. Make sure you set your vent to pressure cook. Next we are going to be hitting our pressure cook function and then setting the timer to eight minutes and cooking it on high. And now it's going to take the instant pot about I don't know eight to ten minutes to come to temperature and then our cooking time is going to be another eight minutes so it's probably about a little bit shy of 20 minutes total. All right guys so while the chicken is cooking I want to give you a quick note as to why I love this instant pot so much. Pressure cooking is like this total miracle of a cooking tool. What it allows you to do is to create a ton of pressure inside this pot which then cooks whatever you put into it like probably twice as fast as if you did it on the stovetop in a dutch oven. It breaks down vegetables and breaks down proteins and makes them falling apart tender. All right guys our eight minute timer just finished so now we're going to do a natural pressure release. It's always a little jarring so just hit this button at the top here. So all that pressure and all that steam that's And you have to do this before you take the lid off because if you just force the lid off without doing a natural pressure release I don't know what would happen but I feel like it could be like a bomb going off so do not do that. Do the natural pressure release before you take the top off. And once we've given this a few seconds let's see okay now the top can come off and let's see how we did. Whoa let me show you guys these look so incredible and look at that beautiful instant pot lemon garlic chicken thigh. These look so delicious. I cannot wait to give these a try but before I do if you love this recipe and you want to see more just like it check out my instant pot recipes playlist. Okay let's give these a try. All right guys so one thing really important that you cannot miss. Take some of this sauce out of the bottom of the pot and just put it right over the top of these chicken thighs. It really is such an incredible sauce and also if your sauce comes out a little bit you know a little watery you could put in some flour in here and just mix it up and that will thicken the sauce really nicely. But my sauce looks pretty good so I don't need to do that today and let's give these a try. Guys you've got to try these instant pot lemon garlic chicken thighs. They are so incredible. You really taste all the citrus from the lemon coming through, the onion, the garlic, and this beautiful sauce that you pour on top. These are so delicious. You've got to give them a try. Please promise me you will. I'll see you in the next video.