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Vanna White’s Go-To Dinner Has Just 5 Ingredients
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- Vanna White shared her family’s easy, onion-forward chicken recipe—Uncle Roy’s Chicken.
- The dish features chicken, sweet onions, ginger, red pepper flakes and white wine.
- Basted while roasting, the chicken turns tender and flavorful—perfect with crusty bread.
After more than 40 years on Wheel of Fortune, it’s no surprise that Vanna White has made her way into our hearts and homes over the years. And now that we know about her culinary side, Vanna’s influence might just make its way out of our living rooms and into our kitchens, too.
The television host recently shared a family chicken recipe on her Instagram, and it’s as easy as it is delicious. Plus, it’s a family recipe—which means generations of love go into every bite.
In her post, White admits that she’s not a great cook and tags in her son, Nikko Santo Pietro, to help guide us all through the recipe. Together they make Uncle Roy’s Chicken, named after—you guessed it—a family member named Roy who made it for them when they lived in New York.
“I fell in love with it,” White says about the simple recipe. “And Nikko learned how to make it—and he does it just as good as Uncle Roy.”
For this recipe, you’ll need to gather your pantry staples like olive oil and salt, plus five ingredients: fresh ginger, some large onions, crushed red pepper flakes, white wine and chicken. Specifically, you’ll need either a whole chicken, broken down into pieces, or a pack of chicken thighs.
To start, peel your ginger—we love Nikko’s method of using a spoon to quickly peel it. Finely chop a thumb-sized portion for your chicken. Then chop the onions into large slabs. Vanna and Nikko opt for four sweet onions and slice each one into eight segments. They also share their new tips for avoiding tears while chopping onions: wearing sunglasses and chewing minty gum.
Then saute the onions in a large, oven-safe skillet or saucepan with some hot pepper flakes and water, which creates steam. Add half of the ginger for a punch of flavor.
When the onions are translucent but still firm, after about five minutes, remove them from the heat and transfer them to a big bowl. Add some olive oil in the bottom of the pan and add the chicken to the pan to sear. After searing the chicken on both sides, deglaze the pan with white wine to release the fond—those flavorful brown bits stuck to the surface of the pan. Vanna does the honors of pouring in about half a bottle of white wine, but the recipe calls for only a cup.
To polish this recipe off, the mother-son team pour the onions on top of the chicken in the pan and note that the dish “goes to bed” in an oven set to 450 degrees for 50 to 60 minutes. You could set-and-forget this recipe, but the duo recommends you baste your chicken every 15 minutes or so for the best results. When they pull the finished product from the oven, the onions are black on top, which Nikko calls “perfect.”
They’d previously forgotten to salt the dish, so Vanna and Nikko add it at the end of the cooking process. We’d recommend salting a little earlier on—maybe a pinch with the onions and a pinch with the chicken—but last-minute seasoning can be an easy way to rescue a recipe.
When this dish comes out of the oven, serve some chicken and onions on each plate. The chicken should be truly tender, falling apart under your fork. Vanna’s family recommends serving this dish with a nice slice of crusty bread to soak up the flavorful sauce, and we think a side of roasted veggies or a simple side salad would really bring it all together. However you dish it up, each bite will be packed with juicy, onion-forward flavor.