Lemon chicken is such a simple dish. Grab your chicken, grab some lemon and some other spices of your choice, cook them together, and hey presto, a main dish!
Ina Garten’s many recipes all pride themselves on being simple to make for yourself and have often become instant favorites among friends and family.
Ina Garten’s take on lemon chicken is no different and have become amongst her most popular recipes out there!
We have compiled a list of the best lemon chicken recipes that either replicate Ina Garten’s amazing lemon chicken or use it as a springboard for a wealth of new ideas.
The trick that you’ll quickly learn with these recipes is that while the basic lemon chicken dish is simple, Ina Garten doesn’t just leave it at a few chopped lemons and fresh chicken (see also “Best Ina Garten Lemon Pasta Recipes“).
They’re great starting points, but there are so many ways to add some extra zest to this dish, you know?
Speaking of zest, this recipe doesn’t just stop at throwing in lemons and calling it a day. Every part of the lemon is added to the dish in extra ways.
Yes, you have the lemons that are juiced and added to the pan or skillet, but there’s also the zest that you can add too.
Heck, even having great big pieces of chopped lemon, rind and all, are a great way of letting all of the lemon flavors soak into the pan, and into the juicy chicken.
The results speak for themselves, with a chicken dish that will soon become a mid-week favorite for pretty much everyone!
Don’t get comfortable with just one recipe yet. There’s a whole slew of amazing lemon chicken dishes that we have lined up, ready for you to try, this one included!
The real hero of dishes like these isn’t just the lemon and chicken, or even the spices that you might through in with them. For us, it’s the olive oil that you add that brings everything together.
It has a distinct flavor that it adds to the chicken.
But more important than that, it also allows all of the flavors of the ingredients to blend, helping make a sauce/flavoring that has pretty much everything we love about lemon chicken.
The lemon juice, the fresh thyme, and dried oregano.
Heck, even the white wine that is added to the blend is boiled down into a purer flavor that just sits in the olive oil, ready for the chicken to absorb into a delicious, succulent mouthful.
We’re getting hungry just describing it. Imagine how good it is to make it for yourself!
Well, try this one out, and see for yourself just how great it tastes!
Lemon chicken is often considered to be one of the easiest recipes that you can make with chicken, especially with how few ingredients you need (at least technically).
Still, even this can be a little intimidating for folks who aren’t that experienced with cooking. This is why we particularly love easier versions of classic recipes to try, like this one!
We particularly love how simply every part of this recipe is explained in this dish. It’s in just 8 steps, and it outlines every step that you need to take comprehensively.
There’s no confusion about how long you need to be cooking for, what color the chicken will be when it is ready to eat, or the consistency that your lemon sauce will need to be.
It’s steps like those that make it great for beginners!
And it’s not like you’re missing out on any flavors, either.
Everything that you could love about a good lemon chicken is here, from the herbs to the white wine, the olive oil, and, yes, the lemon and chicken breast.
Because it wouldn’t exactly be a lemon chicken recipe without them, would it?
Plus, it’s not going to take you long to make, either. 20 to 25 minutes is all it takes to make this amazing dish, so there’s no excuse to not at least give this one a try!
While many recipes and chefs opt to cook their lemon chicken in a pan, you’ll often find that many Ina Garten recipes opt for cooking your meat in a skillet, this lemon chicken dish included!
This particular recipe is a little more intense than the beginner one that we just covered.
Not just in flavor or difficulty, but also in the number of ingredients.
With a few extra herbs and vegetables added to the mix, such as fennel seeds and onions, this recipe might be a little trickier to get right, especially if you have no experience cooking in a skillet pan as opposed to a pan (which tends to be a little easier to handle and cook in).
However, that extra difficulty is worth it. We’ve loved all of the recipes that we’ve covered so far, but this one has a richness to it that will be tough for even a professional meal to beat!
Similar to the last recipe, this is another skillet-based recipe that prepares an amazing lemon chicken that the whole family can enjoy.
This recipe, which is still inspired by Ina Garten’s recipe, recommends blending your spices in a food processor to get a nice base blend that you can add to your chicken and lemon while they are cooking.
However, while that is a totally fine strategy to use, we much prefer a pestle-and-mortar strategy when making this.
There’s just something nice about grinding up the herbs and seeds yourself with some simple tools and a little elbow grease, you know?
When cooking your ingredients in the skillet, the order in how you add stuff will affect the final flavor too. The lemon should go at the bottom of the pan, while garlic and onions should go on top of them.
One of the things that we love about these lemon chicken recipes is that they don’t require any extra sources to be added. At least, if you’re looking to keep things simple.
If you’ve been keeping an eye on the recipes that we’ve covered, you may have realized that the many wet ingredients that you’re adding, from the lemon juice to the white wine, to the oil, are the bases for a phenomenal sauce.
This recipe helps illustrate that a little better by separating the chicken front the sauce, making the latter on its own, then adding them together to finally cook them.
So, technically, you’re not just getting a great lemon chicken out of this recipe, you’re also getting a delicious lemon sauce to go along with it.
Not just for chicken now, but for any meal plan that you might have in mind.
While we’re on the subject of aspects of lemon chicken that we love, this recipe highlights another aspect that makes this dish so popular.
While this and many other lemon chicken dishes do call for salt, it’s nowhere near as much as you might expect for recipes that serve more than one person.
A lot of the flavor for these dishes comes from the olive oil, the white wine, and, of course, the lemon juice too.
This leads to a recipe, like this, that is surprisingly low in saturated fats and other unhealthier aspects of food.
So, you can eat plenty of portions of this dish, and rest easy in the knowledge that it’s all good for you.
I'm Barbara Hunt, the founder of WomenChefs.org. Being a mom of two, I understand the challenges of meal planning and the monotony it can bring.
That's why I created WomenChefs.org, a platform dedicated to showcasing the skills and delicious dishes crafted by amazing women. My goal is to provide a space where women can find delectable recipes that tantalize their taste buds and ignite their senses.
I hope you'll join me in exploring WomenChefs.org and discovering your next favorite recipe. Let's embrace culinary diversity and try something new together!
