Chicken in Creamy Green Onion Sauce - Low-Carb, So Simple! -- gluten-free, sugar-free recipes with 5 ingredients or less (2024)

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It’s great to notice that the best dishes are usually the simplest. That is also the case with this simple but superb dish: easy to make, only 5 healthful ingredients and your taste buds hurtle to heaven! (Figuratively speaking…)

Tips for making the dish

The best result you get if you use low enough heat. The chicken might turn out dry if the heat is too high. Don’t overcook the chicken, that makes the meat tough.

The green onion (= spring onion)alsoenjoys the gentle warmth of medium-low or even low heat. The onion shouldn’t basicallygetany color, it should retain its fresh, bright green and white colors. That’s why it’s added quite in the end. If the onion gets color it easily tastes ugly and burned. Cooking the onion too long cooks away the fresh taste, which is the key here.Other than that, this is very easy dish to make. Just follow the directions and you definitely won’t suck seed but succeed (ouch, that was a bad joke…).

Oh, still one note about the thickness of the sauce. So, the thickness depends on how much fluid is left on the skillet from the chicken after cooking it until the state where juices run clear. If you prefer thick sauce, simply reduce the amount of fluid by cooking the chicken uncovered for the last minutes before adding the green onion. In the first photo of this blog post I have quite thin sauce whereas in the rest of the pics I have made the sauce thick.

So, here we go.

Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. Take a good pat (2 tablespoons = 1 oz = 30 g) of butter and drop it on the skillet.

When the butter is melted and got some color (don’t let it get brown, though), add the chicken breast halves.

Turn the heat to medium-low, cover and let simmer for some 10 minutes, depending on the thickness of the chicken breast halves.

While the chicken is simmering, chop the green onion.

Use both the green and the white part.

Turn over the chicken breast halves, cover and let simmer for another 10 minutes or until the juices run clear. The total cooking time highly depends on the thickness of the chicken breast halves. Very thin pieces don’t actually need that many minutes.

When the juices run clear, add the chopped green onion.

Stir, and let the onion cook for 1–2 minutes.

Turn off the heat. Add the salt and the sour cream.

Mix well.

Cover and let stand on the stove top for 5 minutes. Mix well before serving. Bon appétit!

My experiments with this dish

Actually, I didn’t need to go too much to trouble with this dish, everything just fell to their places relatively easily. The order of adding the ingredients and the cooking times needed the most attention and some experiments before I was satisfied. Well, this hearty dish sure made me satisfied every time I ate it, whether my experiments were successful or not. But getting the best taste without any compromise was my aim.

My idea for this dish started simply from the contents of my fridge. I had chicken breast halves and green onions, both of which I had to use somehow. Anyway, chicken and green onion sounded like a great combination.

As I love rich flavors, I wanted to make my chicken dish creamy. Heavy cream would have been too lame, so I chose sour cream to give a slight sour note and a bit of the needed gentle tang. First I made the mistake that I let the sour cream cook too long. It curdled. Moreover, I used too little sour cream. Later I learnt that 8 oz (230 g) was just right to get enough sauce but not that the chicken would have been swimming in it.

In the beginning I used thin chicken breast halves. First I sautéed some green onion in butter, then added the chicken and cooked until tender. Because the cooking time was so short, the green onion retained its fresh taste quite nicely.

When taking the first photos for this blog post I used thick breast halves, which I hadn’t used before for this dish. Again, I cooked the onion in butter and added the chicken breast halves. This time however, the chicken took long to cook before it was done. In the end, after adding the sour cream, I noticed that the flavor of the green onion had disappeared almost entirely, so had the color.

I was wondering what to do and how to get the flavor of the green onion more prominent and first of all fresh. Suddenly it came to me, that maybe frying the chicken in the butter first and adding the onion after the chicken is done would do the trick.

That worked perfectly! I got the fresh, savory green onion taste I had hoped for. The color was also beautifully bright, nothing wilted there. Well, I had to take new photos, but that wasn’t too bad job, I love photographing anyway. And we got more tasty chicken to eat. Win-win.

Tips for variation

In my opinion this dish is perfect as it is. However, if you are a garlic lover you can add some crushed garlic together with the green onion if you like. Personally, I like the flavor of green onion in this dish and I don’t want anything else to steal the show.

If you prefer more sauce, you can simply use 12 oz (340 g) sour cream. You can also add another chopped green onion.

Garnish the ready dish with some fresh, chopped green onion. Alternatively, good old parsley goes also well. Let’s keep things basic!

P.S. If you haven’t tried out yet my famous Turnip Fries, they make a perfect side dish with this creamy chicken. And if you would like to have some bread,this low-carb bread recipe is popular and extremely tastyin all its simplicity. For dessert, may I suggest some more heavenly creaminess with this indulgent low carb ice cream?