Going online to look for an oven fried chicken recipe can be surprising and even a little bit intimidating. Hundreds of thousands of recipes? And the really crazy thing is, most of those are unique recipes. It's not just one recipe that's posted all over the place.

So how do you pick the one that's right for you? The search engines don't know your personal preferences when it comes to food, and it's just not practical to sift through all those recipes.

The best way to find your perfect oven fried chicken recipe is to realize that oven fried chicken isn't a recipe. It's a cooking method, a particular way of cooking chicken. And when you know and understand that cooking method, you don't need a recipe – you create your own to suit your tastes!

Do you know the expression "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for life?" It very much applies to cooking. Because a recipe is, well, just a recipe. And that's not a bad thing at all, especially when it happens to a recipe you love! But a cooking method is a hundred recipes in one.

Oven fried chicken isn't hard to make. It's just a matter of following the right steps – and tweaking each step to suit your tastes. So go ahead... make your own oven fried chicken recipe. Just follow these easy steps.

1. Choose a cut of chicken. That's the easy part. Any cut of chicken will do, but it should be the right size for the chicken to be juicy when the breading is crisp.

2. Dunk the chicken in a liquid. This liquid coating is what helps the breading stick. I like to use sour cream, thinned, but there are a lot of liquids to choose from. They each have a unique flavor, and the thicker the liquid, the thicker the breading.

3. Coat the chicken in breading. Again, you have plenty of choices that give a unique flavor and texture to the chicken, like bread crumbs or crushed cornflakes. And adding a teaspoon or two of different spices gives you infinite possibilities.

4. Cook the chicken. Just place it on a greased cooking sheet, and let it cook in an oven preheated to 400F for 50 minutes, flipping the chicken halfway through. And then just cook it until the breading is brown and crisp, and the chicken is at 165F.

And there you have it. With those four steps, you can make your own oven fried chicken recipe, just the way you like it.

So don't limit yourself to a single recipe when you have hundreds right at your fingertips.