Healthy Fried Food Recipes and Cooking Tips

Featured Recipes

Oven-Fried Chicken

Great news—crunchy, flavorful fried chicken can be healthy. We marinate skinless chicken in buttermilk to keep it juicy. A light coating of flour, sesame seeds and spices, misted with olive oil, forms an appealing crust during baking. And with only 7 grams of fat per serving rather than the 20 in typical fried chicken—that is good news.

» Oven-Fried Chicken

Almond-Crusted Chicken Fingers

Instead of batter-dipped, deep-fried nuggets, we coat chicken tenders in a seasoned almond and whole-wheat flour crust and then oven-fry them to perfection. With half the fat of standard breaded chicken tenders, you can enjoy to your (healthy) heart's content.

» Almond-Crusted Chicken Fingers

Oven-Fried Zucchini Sticks

Our oven-baked zucchini sticks taste every bit as good as their deep-fried brethren with only a fraction of the fat and calories. Serve with a side of your favorite marinara sauce for dipping.

» Oven-Fried Zucchini Sticks

EatingWell Fish Sticks

You can make these homemade fish sticks in about the same amount of time it takes to bake a box of the frozen kind. Make it a meal: Serve with lemon wedges, coleslaw, roasted new potatoes and a dollop of tartar sauce.

» EatingWell Fish Sticks

Oven-Fried Potatoes & Sweet Potatoes

Hungry for fries? Slice potatoes into long thin wedges, toss with a little oil, salt and pepper, and pop them in the oven. They'll crisp to perfection—irresistible.

» Oven-Fried Potatoes & Sweet Potatoes

Discover the secret to frying with less fat and fewer calories.

You love fried food, right? But you also know it’s pretty bad for you. What if we told you “fry” is OK? No, not deep-fried, trans-fat-laden junk, but a lighter, smarter type of “fry.”

Our easy, oven-frying technique delivers a crisp, seasoned exterior and moist, tender interior without all the fat and calories of deep-frying. For the basic technique, we have you coat your food in a light breading, spray it with oil and bake it on a rack. An oil spray bottle works great and so does cooking spray. Sometimes we go for a slight variation—brown the coated food in a bit of oil in a skillet and then finish it in the oven. That way it gets crisp on the exterior but doesn’t burn and requires only a little oil.