Baked BBQ Chicken Legs {Plus a Vacuvita® Giveaway!}

Add a burst of flavor to your BBQ chicken with this quick and easy marinade using pantry ingredients. It’s a great marinade for pork chops, too!

This is a collaboration with Vacuvita®. All opinions are my own.

Chicken legs are a great (and affordable!) protein to have on hand in your freezer. I scored some family packs for $0.29/lb and I knew we had to do BBQ chicken at least once. Although BBQ sauce has tons of flavor, I love to marinade my chicken beforehand for an extra boost.

While you can easily marinade overnight, I wanted to try my new Vacuvita® One Touch Vacuum Storage System. It comes with small and large bags, perfect for marinading all types of things. I was given a Vacuvita® to review and I figured this would be a great way to try it out. I’m willing to try anything to help with our food waste at home!

Vacuvita® is like a modern day, high tech, connected bread box.  It stores food in an eye-catching container, the Home Base, to keep it fresher longer. The Home Base then pairs with an easy-to-use vacuum tube to seal food in coordinating, reusable containers or vacuum seal bags.

Here’s the truth: I really wanted to love the Vacuvita®. I’ve heard how convenient it is to have a vacuum sealer to preserve food and I’d love to use it for storing markdown meat I find. For our smaller kitchen, the size was a bit much. I really loved the vacuum hose attachment, but I wish that was sold separately. Also, I found the replacement bags and containers pretty pricey.

It comes with one storage container, which was nice to have, although I’d love to have it clear instead of in color. It was hard to see what was inside…I almost forgot about the fruit I put in there! Overall, though, it works really well…just not a great fit for our family. If you’re interested in checking it out, I have a chance for you to win it later in this post! WOOHOO!

One perk of using a vacuum sealer to marinade is that you can get TONS of flavor added to your meat in a fraction of the time. In just 20 minutes, these legs were bursting with flavor. This is my go-to marinade for chicken.

The vacuum sealer attaches to the base and it quickly removes all air from the bag. Since I had quite a few chicken legs, I used the size large bags.

I could see myself using these bags on my Sunday prep to get my meals ready for the week. It would be great to freeze meat in the marinades, too!

5 from 1 vote

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Quick & Easy BBQ Chicken Marinade

To add extra flavor to your BBQ chicken, try this easy marinade with pantry favorite items! Great for pork, also!

Ingredients

• 1 16 ounce bottle Roasted Red Pepper dressing try Kraft!
• 1 packet onion soup mix
• 2 pounds bone-in chicken legs (or thighs!)
• 1 16 ounce bottle favorite BBQ sauce

Instructions

1. In a small pourable bowl, add bottle of dressing and onion soup mix. Stir.
   

2. For vacuum sealer bags: Place chicken legs in bag. Pour marinade over. Seal bag and vacuum seal. Refrigerate for at least 20 minutes.
   

   For container marinading: Place chicken legs in container. Pour marinade over, using tongs to coat. Cover and refrigerate for at least 3 hours, no longer than 24.
   

To bake, preheat oven to 400º. Line a cookie sheet with a cooling rack (this allows the chicken to get extra crispy on all sides).

1. Coat cooling rack with cooking spray. Using tongs, remove chicken legs from marinade and put on rack. Bake until cooked through, about 30 minutes.
   

2. Brush with BBQ sauce and bake for an additional 5 minutes.
   

Be sure to pin this for later!

While the chicken is baking, I like to add another pan of veggies to roast. Usually I use whatever I have on hand, including cauliflower, broccoli, onions, peppers or carrots and season with grill spice. So delish!

I’ll be giving away a Vacuvita in my group this week…head over to join and enter to win!