The Best Easy Baked Garlic Lemon Chicken Breasts Recipe (2024)

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The Best Easy Baked Garlic Lemon Chicken Breasts Recipe – tender, juicy chicken baked to perfection and bursting with garlic lemon flavor!

If you love lemon and garlic, this easy keto recipe is for you – it is packed with flavor and simple enough for any level home cook to make.

This super simple baked chicken is delicious, tender and juicy – loaded with garlic and lemon flavor right out of the pan.

You can add this chicken to wraps, tacos, salads, sandwiches, burritos, and more – or serve with roasted garlic potatoes, cauliflower rice, rice pilaf, cacio e pepe, or in a chicken and fruit salad!

We hope you love this recipe as much as we do.

Don’t want all the extras in a recipe post? 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.

Baking lemon garlic chicken breasts is incredibly easy – just marinate, season, and bake – but there are a couple tips and tricks we use to make sure our baked chicken breasts turn out tender and juicy every time.

Nobody wants dry, tough chicken breasts – so consider some of our following tips:

• Marinate for at least 30 minutes before cooking
• Lightly pound chicken breasts to keep them roughly the same thickness so they can cook evenly
• Use a digital thermometer to gauge chicken doneness instead of going by time to prevent overcooking

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 (without peel)
• 1 tablespoon garlic powder (you can use garlic salt, but omit salt below if you do)
• 1 lemon, sliced
• 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.

Lemony garlic chicken breasts go with just about everything – but these easy keto chicken breasts are great with air fried asaparagus, broccolini, farro salad, whole roasted cauliflower, and more!

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

If you love chicken, you’re in luck – we have lots of delicious chicken based dishes that are bursting with flavor!

You can find our other chicken recipes here.

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