Clean Eating Baked Greek Chicken Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How to cook chicken for healthy diet? ›

Choose chicken without the skin for less saturated fat and cholesterol. Healthy preparation options include broiling, baking, roasting, steaming, or grilling foods.

Ingredients for Greek Chicken

As with most European dishes, simplicity is key. This dish is no exception. The marinade is a combination of lemon juice and red wine vinegar, garlic, oregano and olive oil. Whether you use chicken thighs or breast meat is your choice.

Baking: Baking is a fantastic way to cook chicken without any added fats. Simply season your chicken with your favorite herbs and spices, place it on a baking tray lined with parchment paper, and bake it in a preheated oven. This method creates tender and juicy chicken with a crispy exterior.

Never cook it cold. By allowing chicken breast to come to room temperature, you'll ensure it cooks more evenly once it hits the pan. Plus, by opting for skin-on chicken instead of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, you'll get a more flavorful dish with more texture and moisture.

Baking your chicken is a great weeknight dinner option, especially if you're trying to lose weight. In addition to being low in fat and calories, baked chicken is rich in important nutrients. Stir-fried chicken. Try stir-frying chicken with a bit of oil and your favorite veggies for a high fiber, protein-packed meal.

As a lean meat, chicken doesn't have much fat — so aim for 100g per day as part of a balanced diet to make sure you're getting what you need. High is protein, it's a solid choice for feeling satiated for longer, weight loss and maintaining lean body mass.

The traditional flavors of Greek food come from the sun-drenched Greek herbs and spices grown along the hillsides on the main island of Greece. Dill weed, thyme, oregano and mint are Greek essentials that really add bold character to fish, meat or vegetables.

Thanks to its acidity — different from the kind you find in citrus or vinegar — it tenderizes the meat, keeping it juicy and never rubbery. Give yourself 15 minutes, and Greek yogurt will reward you with tastier, more tender chicken.

Chemical changes occur during cooking. Oven gases in a heated gas or electric oven react chemically with hemoglobin in the meat tissues to give it a pink tinge. Often meat of younger birds shows the most pink because their thinner skins permit oven gases to reach the flesh.

How to get seasoning to stick to chicken without oil? ›

Before you hit your food with those seasonings, use a spray bottle to spray it with a light coating of water, broth, or cooking vinegar. This adds a wet coating for salts and other seasonings to stick to, without the need for oil. Alternatively, just dry-roast your meat or veggies to bring out their natural flavors.

Can you cook chicken with butter instead of oil? You have to cook chicken at a lower temperature if you bake or pan-fry chicken using butter instead of oil. This is because butter has a lower scorching temperature. Your chicken will cook more slowly, but it's also likely to be juicier and full of more flavor.

Temperature and Timing

Cooking lean meats at a high temperature means they cook more quickly, and this can help capture the moisture and flavor. Adler recommends cooking bone-in chicken breast at 450 degrees, which can take up to 20 minutes for a bone-in breast.

When creating a healthy diet plan, grilled chicken is almost always a staple. This is because grilled chicken is lean and contains far less fat and calories than other types of meat. Eating it regularly can help you lose weight, especially when you swap it out for fattier meats like beef or pork.

Use Cooking Spray

One of the best ways to make fried chicken healthier is by eliminating cooking oils. Instead, use cooking spray, which has about 9 calories for every 1 second of spraying. Another perk to using cooking spray over cooking oil is that your kitchen will stay a lot cleaner!

Chicken is a healthy food (as long as it's poached, baked or grilled), but that doesn't mean you should eat it every single day. As both dietitians have explained, eating a wide variety of foods is the best way to give your body the nutrients it needs.