The Best Easy Baked Chicken Breasts Recipe – delicious, easy, and quick baked chicken breasts that are juicy and tender, right out of the oven!

Baked chicken is one of our family’s favorite easy dinners – it can go in all sorts of easy dinners, is great on salads, and comes out perfectly tender and juicy.

We’re sharing our recipe for the best baked chicken breasts – baked in olive oil, garlic, and a dash of lemon juice – for perfect chicken your whole family will love.

This chicken is delicious any day of the week, and always a huge hit with our kids.

We love to serve baked chicken in Instant Pot Chicken Alfredo, or alongside sauteed zucchini and squash, no knead jalapeno cheddar bread, baked beans, or in chicken and fruit salad, The Best Chopped Chinese Chicken Salad Recipe, and our crazy Easy Bacon Chicken Ranch Macaroni and Cheese Recipe!

You can find our web story for this recipe here.

Here at Sweet C’s we know we have lots of types of readers – some who want lots of information about the recipes they are making, some who want just certain tips, and some who want to get straight to the recipe. While our posts are longer and broken up into many sections, we do this to provide you with enough information to feel empowered to make a great dish every time you step in the kitchen, no matter your comfort level cooking.

We provide a skip to recipe button in the top left corner, as well as a clickable table of contents, just below, to help make this page easier to navigate.

We designed this recipe to work in a gluten and grain free low carb diet.

While chicken breasts aren’t always the best choice for a keto diet because they have less fat, this chicken is a good option for a wide variety of keto dishes that call for chicken breast – and great with vegetables, on salads, or other keto meals.

This recipe was designed to not only be insanely easy – any one can make this dish regardless of their experience in the kitchen – but it’s also super customizable.

We made our marinade and chicken seasonings pretty simple for a reason – this recipe is meant for you to customize however you love it!

Use some of our ideas below for different flavors to try swapped out for the Italian Herbs we’re calling for below:

• Za’atar
• Adobo seasoning
• Fajita spices
• Taco seasoning
• Lemon pepper rub
• Montreal steak seasoning

We recommend baking fully thawed chicken breasts for the best texture – but we’re adding the method to bake chicken breasts from frozen if you’re in a pinch and need dinner on the table.

This method is safe to use for chicken right from the freezer, with a few basic tips:

• Plan on double the cook time if cooking from frozen
• Space single chicken breasts out across the pan – do not try to bake a clump of chicken breasts frozen together
• Use a digital thermometer and make sure the middle of the thickest part of the chicken breast cooks to at least 165 degrees
• Cover in olive oil – you won’t marinate chicken if it is frozen – but still bake it in our marinade recipe below to help keep chicken juicy and from drying out
• Flip chicken as it cooks to ensure it is cooking evenly

The two most important tips to baking perfect chicken are pretty simple – marinate first, and monitor cook time with a digital thermometer.

Marinating chicken helps to lock in juices, tenderize meat, and give a great flavor – we’re not only marinating, but baking our chicken in the marinade, for even more flavor!

Using a digital meat thermometer is essential for baked chicken to ensure you’ve reached a safe temperature, and to make sure you don’t overcook your chicken breasts.

Chicken is cooked at 165 degrees – which means removing from the oven at 160 degrees.

Chicken will carryover cook to 165 if you remove from the oven at 160.

Always let chicken rest for at least 10 minutes before cutting to help the juices recirculate and lock in.

The base of our chicken’s flavor comes from the marinade we’re baking the chicken in – a simple chicken marinade is really easy to whip up.

For any marinade you make, aim for 1 oil (olive oil, avocado oil), 1 acid (lemon juice, vinegar), and herbs.

Dry herbs will work best – but you can use fresh if you’d like – add a bit more than dried.

• 1 cup olive oil
• 6-8 cloves garlic (with or without peel)
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon Italian Herbs
• 1 teaspoon celtic sea salt
• 1 teaspoon pepper

Chicken breasts will take about 25 minutes to cook at 350 degrees – 50 if baking from-frozen.

One tip to get extra juicy chicken is to cook it for less time at a higher temperature – around 22 minutes at 400 degrees.

• 25-30 minutes at 350 degrees
• 22-25 minutes at 400 degrees

As always, please go by your thermometer temperature, not your clock, to gauge when chicken is done cooking.

No matter how much time has elapsed, chicken is considered fully cooked and safe to eat at 165 degrees.

While our cook times are good for a guide to plan getting dinner on the table, please always go by temperature – not by time – when judging your chicken’s doneness.

Baked chicken is a recipe that goes with basically everything – we love it alongside broccolini or baby cauliflower, whole roasted cauliflower, whole roasted onions, air fryer corn on the cob, farro salad, and more!

To find the rest of our easy side dishes, please check out our side dish recipe index here.

If you’re looking for even more delicious recipes with chicken breasts, please check out some of our favorites below:

You can find our other chicken recipes here.

If you love this easy recipe please click the stars below to give it a five star rating and leave a comment! Please also help me share on facebook and pinterest!

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