Ina Garten's 3-Ingredient Chicken Really Is The 'Easiest Dinner'

Ina Garten may not be Southern (we wish she were), but she is a fantastic cook, with tips and tricks that every home cook can appreciate. Her recipes, while sometimes a little unusual to us Southerners, are always special and inspiring, and you rarely must have access to a Hamptons' cheese shop or a Paris boulangerie to pull them off.

Case in point: A recipe she calls "the easiest dinner I know how to make." It's a three-ingredient roasted chicken dinner that has all the flavor and richness of a stuffed chicken breast, but without the acrobatics of slicing, stuffing, rolling, and pinching the chicken to keep the fillings inside the meat.

How To Make Ina Garten's 3-Ingredient Chicken Dinner

Simple Ingredient List

For this recipe, Garten explained in her Instagram reel that you'll need chicken breast, goat cheese, and fresh basil. One caveat: She calls for chicken breasts with the skin still on, and when I went to the store to buy the ingredients for this dinner, my grocery store did not have boneless, skin-on chicken breast. You may want to call ahead and ask your butcher if they can prepare you some when you're ready to try this. I ended up using skin-on boneless chicken thighs, and it was plenty tasty and tender.

Easy-To-Follow Steps

The next steps couldn't be easier: Peel back the skin on the chicken breast, and place a round from a goat cheese log on the chicken, followed by basil leaves. Pull the chicken skin back over the cheese and basil, and press it down.

Make Substitutions As You Like

Herbs: I am not a basil person, so I substituted with fresh parsley. You can really use any tender herb here, such as sage, cilantro, or even chives. It's all a matter of personal preference and what you think would pair nicely with the goat cheese.

Cheese: Garten used an herbed goat cheese, as did I, but with plain goat cheese, you could expand your herb options a bit more with great success. You could look for flavored goat cheeses, too, including spicy ones or ones mixed with fig jam.

The Final Steps

Once the chicken skin is back in place, brush the meat with some olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. Bake at 375°F for 30 to 40 minutes.

My slightly smaller chicken thighs were finished precisely at 30 minutes, but thicker breasts may go a little longer into that cook range. To finish, cover the cooked chicken breasts with aluminum foil, and let them rest about 10 minutes before slicing and eating.

"It's about as easy as dinner gets," Garten said in her video, and I can't deny her statement. This is one dinner I'll turn to again and again.

What I Loved About This 'Easiest Dinner'

I really enjoy stuffed chicken breast recipes. A go-to dinner for me when I am too tired to follow a recipe is chicken breasts stuffed with blue cheese, served with butter-sautéed pear slices. It's so comforting, and I'm never not in the mood for it. But asparagus-stuffed chicken, even chicken cordon bleu, is always a welcome dinner at my house.

Garten's dinner takes the work out of the stuffing by tucking the ingredients under the chicken skin. Slicing open a chicken breast and poking cheese or a filling in the pocket is perhaps not at the top of my favorite cooking techniques. If the pocket isn't large enough, everything leaks out. If you don't get enough filling, you feel cheated.

This method is much faster and easier, and you can get plenty of cheese and herbs right on top. I finished my dinner off with a half ear of oven-roasted corn on the cob. And since I have plenty of leftover goat cheese, I'm already planning to make this dish again over the weekend.