Best Chicken Breast Recipes

No matter what time of year, you can find a delicious chicken recipe to complement the season. We find chicken breasts to be incredibly versatile in cooking, because they are low in fat, high in protein, and can be modified for a wide variety of recipes. What are the best chicken breast recipes?!

Let’s explore some delicious seasonal recipes using chicken breasts.

Spring

Whether you’re a fan of one-pan chicken bakes, marinated and grilled chicken, or like to get fancy with a stuffed chicken breast or chicken breast roll-up, springtime is a great time to pair seasonal produce with a light and fresh chicken breast recipe. In spring we’re often coming out of a long winter season filled with heavy meals, holiday overindulgences, and cold-weather comfort food. Springtime is a great time to lighten things up!

For our springtime recipe, we’d like to highlight a spinach and mushroom stuffed chicken breast, with a side of spring asparagus. If stuffed chicken breast sounds intimidating, it’s really not. You simply make a pocket in each chicken breast by slicing horizontally, making sure you don’t go all the way through! Once you’ve stuffed your pocket, you can hold it together with toothpicks until you’re ready to eat. 

We gathered our inspiration from this recipe, which includes mushrooms, onion, garlic, and fresh spinach, but you can feel free to make this recipe your own with your favorite ingredients. Pine nuts would be a delicious addition! While the recipe calls for chicken stock, we think that bone broth from pasture raised chickens would up the health (and yum) factor even more! 

Grilling your asparagus can impart a really interesting charred flavor that adds depth and a bit of savory essence to the taste. Keep it simple by lightly brushing with olive oil, and seasoning with salt, pepper, and maybe a bit of lemon zest if you’re feeling adventurous. 

Summer

Of course, when it comes to summertime recipes, you’ve gotta incorporate the grill! Nothing says summer like relaxing outdoors, enjoying the beautiful summer weather while you enjoy a cold beverage and the aroma of a healthy meal cooking on the grill. 

While bbq chicken is often a go-to for summer, we love a greek-style grilled chicken breast recipe that we adapted from foodiecrush.com. The original recipe uses greek yogurt to help tenderize the meat, but we find that lemon juice does just fine on its own, and allows us to keep this recipe paleo-friendly. 

How to Prepare Easy Greek-Marinated Grilled Chicken Breasts

It goes without saying that with all of these recipes, we use high-quality pasture raised chicken breasts. Not only does pasture raised chicken give a more abundant flavor, but it’s more nutritious and lower in saturated fat.

You’ll want to mix your marinade ingredients first. For two pounds of chicken breasts you’ll need:

• ½ cup olive or avocado oil
• 2 lemons 
• 8 cloves minced garlic
• 4 tbsp dried oregano (4 tsp if you prefer to use fresh)
• 2 tsp sea salt
• 1 tsp black pepper

Zest the lemons and add both the lemon zest and juice to your bowl, along with all other ingredients. Mix together and pour half of the marinade into a gallon sized freezer bag along with the chicken and marinate in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes. You’ll save the remainder of the marinade for basting during grilling. 

Grill on medium high heat for about 20 minutes or until the chicken reaches an internal temperature of 165 degrees fahrenheit, and voila! An easy, healthy, and delicious summer meal. You can serve with grilled summer vegetables and salad for a simple and completely paleo dinner. This recipe is easily modified for small or large groups by tweaking the amount of ingredients. 

Fall

Fall is our most loved cooking season. There are so many delicious seasonings that seem to be reserved particularly for the fall season, and it can be really fun to experiment in the kitchen with some savory herbs and warm, comforting recipes. When it comes to Fall, we have one of the best chicken breast recipes around.

One of our favorite things to cook in fall is soup! This butternut squash and chicken soup recipe can be made in the instant pot or slow cooker and is full of wholesome, paleo ingredients, including fresh herbs, pasture raised chicken breasts, and vitamin-packed butternut squash. While the original recipe is more of a stew, we suggest pureeing the ingredients with an immersion blender after cooking (make sure you do this BEFORE adding the kale!!) to create a creamy, comforting soup. After pureeing, throw in the chopped kale and stir until wilted. A side of paleo biscuits made with almond flour and coconut oil would be a delicious addition, though the soup is plenty filling on its own!

Winter

Winter is such a cozy time, but it can also be a season where many of us like to hibernate, as the days get shorter, the sun goes down earlier, and it can be so tempting just to curl up in front of a fire with a warm blanket and a good book. 

That’s why we love this one pan garlic herb chicken bake with winter vegetables. It’s easy to make, easy to clean up, totally paleo, and incorporates seasonal winter vegetables such as turnips, sweet potatoes, and beets. It makes for a quick, healthy dinner that gives you plenty of time to tuck in early with that book or spend time by that cozy fire. 

For this recipe, you’ll need about 1.5 pounds of boneless, skinless, pasture raised chicken breasts. Fresh herbs, including parsley and thyme are mixed with lemon zest and garlic to create a zesty rub for the chicken. It’s not called for in the recipe, but we think sage is always a wonderful complement to a chicken dish, and would be delicious here. Sage can be a strong herb, so we suggest using a smaller amount than with the other herbs. About 1.5 tsp should do it, compared to the 1 tbsp of parsley and thyme. 

This dish would also be delicious, and even more nutritious, served with a simple kale salad. De-rib the kale and thinly slice, adding to a medium sized bowl. Gently massage the kale with clean hands until it’s bright green, and then top with a simple dressing of olive oil, garlic, lemon zest, salt, and pepper. If you normally love cheese on your kale salad but want to keep this meal paleo, we suggest tossing a couple of tablespoons of nutritional yeast in with the salad just before serving.

Pasture Raised Chicken is Delicious Year Round!

No matter what season you’re in or what type of dish you’re in the mood for, you can always find a delicious chicken breast recipe. Chicken is one of the world’s most popular meats, for its health benefits as well as its versatility. We hope we’ve given you some recipe inspiration today, and keep checking back on the blog as we add more delicious paleo recipes that you can make with pasture raised chicken.