If you need a tasty, nutritious meal in a flash, knowing how to cook a chicken breast on the stove gives you the opportunity to not only cook an entire meal in ten minutes, but do it all in a single pan. Luckily, cooking chicken in a skillet is one of the simplest techniques out there, and one that can easily mastered with a little bit of practice. There are a few different ways to do this, but the following method is the one that I prefer.
How to Cook Chicken Breast In A Skillet
Lay out your chicken and season it on both sides. Use whatever seasoning you like, but for this example, I used kosher salt, black pepper, and a little bit of thyme. You can also use garlic powder, curry powder, paprika, or anything you can think of.
The important thing to keep in mind is that a chicken breast that is cut evenly will cook more evenly. The ones you see here are actually half-breasts. I like them because they cook quickly and evenly without burning.
Place a skillet over medium heat. When it is hot, add a few teaspoons of olive oil and swirl to coat the bottom of the pan. When the oil is hot, add your chicken breasts to the pan. If they still have the skin on them, place them skin side down.
Cover and cook until side A is golden brown and nicely seared. This will take about three to five minutes. Once side A is brown, flip it over and cook uncovered until the juices run clear, again three to five minutes depending on the thickness of the chicken and the heat of the pan.
Remove your chicken from the skillet and cover loosely with aluminum foil so the meat can rest. This is the one step in how to cook chicken on the stove that is most often neglected.
Resting the meat for a few minutes allows it to finish cooking and the juices to settle. If you don’t let it rest, all those lovely juices will run out all over the plate as soon as you cut into it, leaving you with dry, tough chicken. No one wants that.
While your chicken is resting, feel free to use the residual heat in the pan to cook some veggies, such as broccoli, mushrooms, and onions. If, when you were finished with that, you added a bit of wine and chicken broth to the pan and reduced it to a lovely sauce, you would have something very nice indeed.
So, that completes our exploration into how to make pan cooked chicken. It may seem simple, but the huge array of spices and accompaniments make this a staple in my kitchen, especially when there isn’t much time to cook.
So, how do you like your chicken breast cooked? Do you like to spice it up, or keep it simple as I’ve done here? Leave a note in the comments, and thanks for reading.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
It looks fabulous! When I used to eat meat one of my favorite ways to prepare it was floating in some kind of delicious coconut sauce. You have a wonderful site
, Miriam
Thank you very much. I’m not normally a big coconut fan, but one of my favorite ways of cooking chicken with it is chicken tikka over basmati rice.
Looks good, but I’m concerned with the oil… they say you’re not supposed to let it reach it’s smoke point..chicken looking this browned ( and delicious) -hasn’t it reached smoke point?
Not really. When oil reaches the smoke point, it starts to chemically break down and produce all sorts of nasty things. When you sear something like this, you reach the temperature at which the sugars in the chicken caramelize, but the temperature isn’t high enough to break down the oil. If I left the pan unattended, it would have, but adding the chicken drops the temperature of the oil enough to keep it from happening.
Thanks!