Five ingredients, fast prep, and serious flavor. Weeknight chicken just got simpler.

Serious Eats / Qi Ai

Yes, cooking with fewer ingredients can simplify your weeknights and trim your grocery bill—but it can also make you a better cook. Don’t get us wrong: We love a long ingredient list when we’re chasing big, layered flavors. But paring things down forces you to really taste what each component is doing. Season a roast chicken with nothing but salt and you’ll understand how it deepens savoriness and helps the meat stay juicy. Focus on paprika in a chicken paprikash and you’ll notice how blooming the spice in oil transforms its flavor. Build a dish around dark soy sauce and you’ll see how beautifully it caramelizes, adding sweetness as well as umami.

With fewer moving parts, everything becomes clearer: what matters, what doesn’t, and how great flavor comes together. Then, when you return to more complex weekend cooking, you’ll do it with sharper instincts and a better sense of how each ingredient pulls its weight.

Below, we’ve gathered 10 chicken recipes that make the most of tight ingredient lists. Most use five ingredients or fewer, though we let a few six- or seven-ingredient standouts slip in because they’re still simple—and absolutely worth it. (Salt and pepper, as always, don’t count.)

Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez

The internet is full of “best” roast-chicken methods. This one from Daniel Gritzer isn’t just the best—it’s also the laziest. First, you’ll skip any complex seasoning process. When you coat your bird in a proper amount of salt, you won’t need anything else. Lazy step number two: don’t preheat the oven. Putting the bird in at the same time that you turn on the oven mimics a reverse sear method; the interior gently cooks while the skin dries out in the low heat, which will help the skin crisp later when the heat eventually cranks up to 425° F.

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

This cozy Hungarian dish is simple and easy by design, made by generations of loving grandmothers in home kitchens. Since the dish centers around just one spice, it’s important to treat that spice with care. Sourcing a fresh Hungarian-style paprika makes all the difference: Kenji Lopez-Alt recommends this one from Penzey’s. Then, adding the paprika to the onions as they are almost done sautéeing allows the spice to bloom and become more flavorful in the oil. It also lends a toasted complexity to the paprika that takes the dish to a new level.

Blake Royer

Chicken breast can conjure memories of dry, flavorless dinners made as an afterthought, but this recipe will help you overcome the crimes of white meats past. Ask your butcher for bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts. Keeping the bone in allows the chicken to cook more evenly, while the skin acts as a moisture-protecting barrier. You’ll also cook this chicken at high heat on a wire rack—when it cooks quickly, less moisture has the chance to escape. Meanwhile, the wire rack allows the high heat to circulate around the skin, making it extra crispy.

Serious Eats / Julia Hartbeck

If you do have some boneless skinless chicken breast lying around, this Joshua Bousel recipe offers some alternative ways to preserve moisture and prevent overcooking. You’ll take a note from many classic chicken breast dishes and pound the meat to a thin, even width to ensure that it all cooks at the same rate. A dry brine in open air preserves moisture within the breast, while also drying out the exterior for maximum browning.

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Serious Eats / Qi Ai

Each of the five ingredients in this umami-rich chicken dish from Zola Gregory plays an important role. First, dark soy sauce has a thicker, more viscous texture than its lighter counterparts, which allows it to cling to the chicken and to caramelize beautifully when you sear it. Next, sesame oil adds nutty complexity while also ensuring a crispy skin. And finally, a pan sauce made with a stock and cornstarch slurry means that no flavor-packed chicken drippings go wasted. Serve this over steamed white rice. For bonus points, add halved hard boiled eggs and garnish with thinly-sliced scallions.

J. Kenji López-Alt

Slicing your chicken breasts into cutlets means they’ll cook more evenly and quickly—we’re talking five-minutes-level quickly. The marinade for this chicken cutlet recipe features a pared-down list of powerhouse ingredients: aromatic garlic and rosemary, bright lemon juice, and rich olive oil. What’s more? You’ll set half of the mixture aside and it’ll double as a sauce for the cooked chicken.

Serious Eats / Mateja Zvirotic Andrijanic

In this Kenji Lopez-Alt recipe, marinating boneless, skinless chicken thighs in pickle brine infuses them with tart, salty flavor—but the ingredient also plays a crucial role in texture. The acid in the brine breaks down the chicken’s muscle structure, tenderizing the meat and also allowing it to retain moisture during frying. A classic buttermilk drunk and a self-rising flour dredge make for a light, bubbly surface. To get things even more crispy, mix a little buttermilk with flour to create little nuggets of batter that you’ll press into the surface of your chicken thigh—these bits will get crispy and craggly in the frying process.

Serious Eats / Photographer: Morgan Hunt Glaze, Food Stylist: Julian Hensarling, Prop Stylist: Claire Spollen

Moist, savory, and inexpensive chicken thighs are a hero ingredient for weeknight dinners. They’re a natural pairing with another speedy weeknight dinner main character: the air fryer, which preheats in a fraction of the time of your oven. When test kitchen editor Julia Levy was tasked with honing in on the ultimate air-fryer chicken thigh recipe, she found that using bone-in, skin-on thighs allowed for maximum juiciness, and that baking soda was a secret-weapon ingredient for maximizing the surface-crisping effects of the air fryer’s convection fan.

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J. Kenji López-Alt

A roast chicken is hard to beat when it comes to a beautiful presentation, but the sad truth is that cooking the whole bird intact does not offer the absolute best result. Breasts will cook faster than thighs, and bits of skin that don’t get exposure to the heating surface or hot air circulation won’t get crispy. Enter the butterflying technique deployed in this recipe, which flattens the bird so that breasts and thighs cook evenly and more of the skin can sear directly on the grill. You’ll also use a few familiar tricks from above: an herbaceous marinade doubles as sauce for the chicken, and you’ll start on low heat for a moist interior, then sear the bird at the end for crisp skin.

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

This Columbian stew not only has just five ingredients, it also comes together in record time thanks to the pressure cooker—and the recipe literally includes one step. Simply season chicken pieces with salt and pepper, then throw them into the pressure cooker with fresh tomatoes, bay leaves, and the starchy vegetable of your choice. What emerges 25 minutes later is a tender and warming stew, and because you didn’t add any liquid to the mix, the broth is incredibly concentrated and rich.