Dinners for Beginners: Three Easy, High-Payoff Chicken Recipes

Put another way, we put so much effort and testing into our recipes that we want you to follow them exactly, verbatim . . . until such a time that you don’t need to and can improvise and adapt them to suit your personal needs and tastes. 

Chicken recipes are foundational to any cook’s repertoire. If you’re new to cooking or relatively inexperienced in the kitchen, chicken recipes are a great place to start. Here are a few of our favorite simple chicken recipes that create dishes with outsize flavor payoffs.

The most challenging part of this recipe is preheating an empty cast-iron skillet, pulling it out of the oven, and carefully laying in seasoned chicken parts. You let the parts roast in the hot oven for 15 minutes, flip them, and let them go another 15 minutes until they’re done. And then you need to let the chicken rest for 10 minutes before serving—come to think of it, that might be the most challenging part of this recipe. 

As for the seasoning, it’s just salt and pepper plus paprika, onion powder, and granulated garlic. The resulting chicken is juicy with nicely browned skin and waaaaay more flavor than you’d expect for such minimal effort. 

When we first published this fan-favorite recipe back in 2019, we led with these words: “Sometimes the best thing you can do in the kitchen is not overthink things.” Truth. 

There’s not much more to this recipe than butter, chicken, broth, and rice, but there is genius—and supreme comfort and deliciousness—in that simplicity. This is food that nourishes the body and soul, that pleases finicky children and snooty gourmands equally, and that belongs in your arsenal. One tip from me, one of this recipe’s biggest fans: Go heavy on freshly ground black pepper at the table. 

This Vietnamese-inspired dish (with a sauce borrowed from chef and cookbook author Charles Phan) may seem odd at first read. Instead of cooking chicken and then tossing it with a sauce, you make a savory caramel sauce with brown sugar, fish sauce, vinegar, chile-garlic sauce, and lots of black pepper and then toss in raw cubed chicken thighs to cook. Easy. 

The flavor of this dish is so good it’s hard to describe. It’s both sweet and savory, with a deep umami richness from the fish sauce and pep from the vinegar and chile-garlic sauce. And the black pepper ties everything together, adding another layer of heat but also musky smokiness. Very complex, very impressive, very easy to make.