Easy 5-Ingredient 1-Skillet Creamy Mushroom Chicken

This 5-ingredient keto dish is full of flavor and umami. Quick and easy to make, it’s a perfect meal for a busy weekday or whenever you don’t want to spend too much effort on cooking — yet desire a tasty and hefty meal.

How to make the Easy 5-Ingredient One Skillet Creamy Mushroom Chicken

In addition to the actual ingredients, you just need a skillet and a stove to prepare this dish. I prefer to fry the mushrooms in butter since I don’t have a non-stick skillet.

And talking about skillet, be sure to have a large enough skillet for making this dish. I was a bit too enthusiastic when mixing the ingredients in my first experiments and spilled a lot of cream on the stove.

If you wonder why there is no pan-searing for the chicken first before adding the cream, it’s because of avoiding AGEs, i.e., Advanced Glycation End Products. They are pretty harmful, and they form, especially when meat — that is high in fat and protein — is cooked at high temperatures. So, that’s why I add the cream together with the chicken so that the heat is mild and moist. Actually, I think that this technique (so cooking the chicken in cream without searing it first) makes the meat more tender.

But without further ado, let’s take a look at how to prepare this simple yet tasty keto meal:

First, take 6 medium button mushrooms. I say the amount rather than the weight since in my first experiment, 6 medium button mushrooms weighed about 13 oz (370 g) when in my final experiment, 6 medium button mushrooms weighed 29 oz (825 g)!

Maybe these mushrooms are on the large side, but I’ve seen much larger in the store, so that’s why I call these medium:

Slice the mushrooms into about 1/4-inch (0.6 cm) thick slices.

Heat a skillet over medium-high heat. Add some butter and let it melt.

Add the sliced mushrooms…

…and 1 teaspoon onion powder.

Cook, stirring occasionally…

…until all the liquid has evaporated.

Add 1 lb (450 g) chicken…

…and 1 cup (240 ml) cream.

Stir properly and cover with a lid. Reduce the heat to the minimum. Let the chicken simmer until done, i.e., the juices run clear, and the cream is reduced into a thick sauce.

Turn the chicken once or twice during cooking. And be careful with the cream so that it doesn’t spill over!

If the sauce is too runny, let it boil over high heat so that the consistency reduces and thickens to your liking.

Serve immediately.

Yum!

 

How I came up with this easy keto dish recipe

For this week, I had three recipe candidates to develop and publish here on my blog. I had two keto cake recipe ideas that were just perfect for the fall time. Then, I also had an idea about a chicken recipe with mushrooms — something really simple and maybe creamy as well.

I couldn’t decide which one of my ideas to develop further, so I experimented with all of them. Well, my experiments turned out a bit disastrous — or then I simply had a bad day. My first cake experiment — keto lemon pound cake — made a wonderful cake batter but a terrible cake: it turned too dark on the top in the oven when the interior was still raw. Moreover, the taste was awfully bitter.

My second cake idea made a bit better cake, but somehow I managed to get the cake stuck into a silicone cake pan. Basically, nothing should get stuck into a silicone pan, so there must have been something working against all the laws of physics because the cake was impossible to remove from the cake pan, and I ended with a pile of crumbs as you see:

However, the taste was incredible, so the recipe needed just a little tweaking — and greasing the cake pan! Well, maybe the texture was a tad too dry, so I would like to make the cake moister in my future experiments.

I thought I drop the cake recipes for now and concentrate on my creamy mushroom chicken recipe. For that, I naturally needed chicken and mushrooms — and cream since I was after a deliciously rich and creamy chicken.

For seasonings, I decided to opt for my favorite natural flavor enhancer: onion powder. In addition, I needed some natural salt and maybe a couple of pinches of pepper. On the other hand, there should be enough taste from mushrooms and onion powder, so maybe I skip the pepper, I thought.

After pondering the amounts of the ingredients and the method, I decided to make the whole dish in a skillet rather than in the oven that was also in my mind. Anyway, I was in a hurry with other projects, so I wanted to make things easy.

I took 4 button mushrooms and sliced them. I thought I cook them first until done before adding the chicken. And if I added the onion powder with the mushrooms, it would release all its flavor better, I concluded.

I didn’t want to sear the chicken in the skillet, first of all, to avoid AGEs, but also to make the meat juicier by cooking it gently in cream. Moreover, I chose very tender chicken – not fillet – for my dish (for all you Finns out there, make sure to use “kanan paistileike” for this recipe). And even better if you find a pastured chicken.

The result was really tasty and succulent! I was surprised that the dish was so tasty, even without any fancy spices or seasonings. The onion powder and the mushrooms lent lots of flavor to the dish. Back to the basics worked like a charm once again!

It was very describing when we were in Ikea with my son, and there was an announcement: “Would you like to reduce your meat consumption?” I replied to myself, “Hell, no!” After getting myself sick with being vegetarian for 20 years, I’ve got absolutely no desire to go back to that misery! And knowing how healthy naturally produced (read: pastured) meat is for humans and the whole globe, this vege boom with all the processed vegetable protein products is just dreadful. Don’t get me wrong, my meat consumption is not very high — but my body and mind require some meat to keep going.

My son agreed. He said, “I want to go home and eat that delicious chicken you made, it’s really good!”. We did our shopping, left, and at home, enjoyed hefty servings of this tasty dish.

Here’s the recipe for you to enjoy:

Nutrition information	In total	Per serving if 4 servings in total
Protein	108.2 g	27.1 g
Fat	114.4 g	28.6 g
Net carbs	9.1 g	2.3 g
kcal	1499 kcal	375 kcal

How to get variation to the recipe

In my opinion, this dish is perfect as is, but you can naturally add more spices if you would like to tweak the recipe somehow. For example, add crushed garlic together with the chicken and the cream. Like that, it will develop a delicious, mellow taste. If you add it already with the mushrooms, it will very likely get too dark and get a pungent flavor.

Herbs are a naturally wonderful way to get more variation to this dish. Personally, I would add thyme as it goes so well with chicken. 1 teaspoon dried thyme cooked together with the mushrooms releases a mouth-watering flavor.

Fresh parsley is a must for decorating the dish. Not only makes it a nice presentation, but also some flavor and freshness to the dish. Naturally, you can use other herbs as well, like fresh thyme, rosemary, oregano – or even mint.

Make sure to check out my other chicken recipes!

General prattling

This week was busy with Facebook marketing — and studying Facebook marketing. I wanted to refresh my skills and took two short Facebook marketing courses. The whole area is exciting and would definitely require more time if done properly.

On Wednesday, we were in Helsinki to meet two possible investors. In the center of Helsinki, there is an interesting place called “Metsä/Skogen” which simply means forest (forest in Finnish is “metsä” and in Swedish “skogen”; we are a bilingual country, as you may know). They sell sustainable lifestyle products related to forest and nature. The store has, for example, real trees and moss as decorations!

Lately, my son has requested hamburgers, so I have created several bun experiments in the microwave oven. They have been surprisingly successful.

Here is one of the hamburgers. The burger is made with organic beef and seasoned just with salt and pepper. In addition, my son wants sugar-free ketchup and cheese in his hamburger, sometimes lettuce as well.

Yesterday, we participated in the keto festival in Bistro Naapuri in the center of Tampere. Even it felt that nobody shared the event on social media beforehand, the restaurant was full of people, and the atmosphere was terrific. People were friendly and happy.

We served our soups and sold my autographed books.

Soon we are going to launch new chocolate keto treats. Hopefully, they will be in stores still during this month. However, as I have my melanger, I had made a batch of our chocolate and nut spread, and we let people take a sneak peek at this treat and taste this brand new product.

I even created a lookalike jar for it before we have the real ones:

Bistro Naapuri had also made keto raspberry truffles using my recipe that you can find in my Finnish book “Järkevä ketoruokavalio.”

At the keto festival, there were many Finnish keto influencers like Mariella Pudas, with whom I’m in the photo below. She’s such a nice young lady!