Keep your diet prep fresh and interesting! Make chicken breasts taste exciting again with a simple teriyaki sauce and some home-cooking techniques.

Time: 4/5
Don’t expect your food anytime soon, especially if you’re cooking the chicken from frozen as recommended.

Effort: 3/5
Again, the utensils do the heavy lifting. Although the kitchen torch might cause concern in the inexperienced.

Sauce is the Boss

Have you ever seen the meme about how bodybuilders eat themselves into depression with bland and boring meals of unseasoned chicken and rice? That’s what I try not to be when I go into a fat loss phase.

Chicken breasts are a staple of diets for a good reason – few other foods can match its high protein content for the low amount of calories. However, adherence is a big deal when it comes to dieting, so finding ways to make chicken breast taste fresh and exciting helps a lot.

Now that the blog has had two years to accumulate my best recipes, it’s become a resource that I use to come up with new meal prep ideas. The same sort of lateral thinking that got me from miso honey salmon, to miso honey chicken, to miso honey cod, to Old Bay crusted cod, and back to Old Bay roasted chicken means that I’m very unlikely to run out of meal prep ideas any time soon.

And so, from the depths of the first months of SWR I summoned the teriyaki chicken thighs recipe, and adapted it for chicken breasts. The same dead-simple sauce, the same kitchen torch makeover to bring some nice char and smoke into a tiny apartment kitchen.

Sous Vide is undoubtedly the king of meal prepping chicken breasts. Cook as much meat as you can fit in the water bath, set the temperature and walk away, come back to perfectly done chicken every time. Cook the breasts from frozen, and you don’t even have to deal with the raw chicken juice! Just add half an hour to the cooking time.

Then again, these teriyaki chicken breasts aren’t the same as if they were made with thighs. Fat is flavour, after all, and the sauce doesn’t cling onto the meat as well without the nooks and crannies in the skin. But they’re delicious in their own right, and a powerful tool to keep the weight loss momentum going when the meal prep rotation is getting stale.

(Oh, and read on for a good reason why you should always wash your veggies!)

Dramatis Personae

Served 6.

Boneless skinless chicken breasts – 1000g

Cooked straight from frozen with 5g of salt in the bag, or about 0.5% of the chicken by weight. The chicken spends so long in the water bath that there is plenty of time for the seasoning to distribute itself through the meat. It’s a bit less salt than what some recipes would suggest, but don’t forget there’s also going to be sodium from the sauce as well.

I’m searing the sauce/glaze onto the chicken with a kitchen torch right in the same pan I made the sauce in. This is a shortcut to develop some browned flavour without having to use another pan. But to do this, you need to make sure the pan can stand up to the heat – I did this on my nonstick skillet in my original chicken teriyaki recipe, and I’m pretty sure I messed up the Teflon coating because of it.

Teriyaki sauce

Roughly 6 teaspoons each of soy sauce, mirin, Chinese rice wine (because I don’t have sake) and sugar. Also, nothing stops you from enhancing the sauce with some minced garlic or ginger.

Reduce it by as much or as little as you like, keeping in mind that the thicker it is the better it will cling onto the chicken. I didn’t go very far, because the boss lady likes having some sauce to spoon over the rice. But if it was just me, I would have cooked it all the way down into a savoury syrup. 

Vegetables

Always eat your veggies, and always wash them! I had about 100g of enoki mushrooms, and 1400g of lettuce. Lettuce grows up through the ground, and all sorts of stuff can get in between their leaves.

Season them however you like. I had some leftover schmaltz and soy sauce from takeaway Hainanese Chicken (something like this, and it’s something I aspire to make myself one day) so I’m upcycling that into the vegetables.

Executive summary

1. Sous vide chicken breasts from frozen, for 2 hours at 60C/140F
2. Make rice. Wash vegetables well, and cut into bite sized pieces.
3. Cook vegetables in a heat-resistant pan. Reserve, and wipe the pan clean.
4. Simmer teriyaki sauce ingredients together until thickened to your liking.
5. Toss chicken breasts in teriyaki sauce, and torch them with a kitchen torch.
6. Assemble and serve.

Play by Play

No spills, no frills. If you can afford the extra time, sous vide cooking straight from frozen is so much more clean than handling defrosted meat.

Nice – the vacuum pump achieved a very good seal. Marginally better than the water displacement method I usually do, but can’t tell for sure without a true side-by-side test.

The immersion circulator has been on the entire time I was seasoning and bagging up the chicken, so it’s almost up to target temp already. The plate helps weigh down the chicken and keep everything submerged.

Chicken is in the water bath and rice the rice cooker is on, which leaves my hands free to cook the vegetables. Press the core of the lettuce in – this will let you extract it, and the leaves come apart much easier.

Always wash your veggies! The dirt you see in my veggie tub is just from the first two heads of lettuce. Drain the vegetables well.

It always looks like there’s too much veg, but it all cooks down. Save the enoki for later, they don’t take long to be done.

What a coincidence, the chicken is done. Remove them from the bags and pat dry.

Vegetables have been reserved, pan has been wiped down. Teriyaki sauce ingredients go in, to be simmered until it becomes a syrup. This is the least you have to reduce it for it to glaze the chicken properly – if I was cooking for just me, I would reduce it even further.

Toss chicken in the sauce, then blast with blowtorch. Don’t do it in a nonstick, or you might ruin the coating! This pan is stainless steel, so it can stand up to the heat. You may want to toss and torch a couple times to build up the glaze.

Plenty of chicken and rice to keep the gains coming. Although the glaze wasn’t quite thick enough to properly coat the chicken, there was plenty of it to take the rice up a notch.

A sprinkle of sesame seeds never hurt nobody – pretty food tastes better.

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