Barbecue Bacon Chicken Bake - One Dish Easy Dinner Recipe! (2024)

Only 1 dish and 4 simple ingredients make this easy dinner recipe OVER THE TOP delicious!! The Easy Barbecue Bacon Chicken Bake combines some of the best bold and rich flavors for a dinner so tasty, you won’t believe you can prep it in only about 10 minutes and clean it up just as easily!

Easy Dinner Recipe

My husband said it’s LOVE! I agreed because this recipe is not only delicious but SO easy to put together and clean up since it is all made in just one casserole dish.

In the past three years we have gone from new parents with one kid to parents (who still are trying to figure it all out) with 3 kids. From having a family where one of us works to one where we both work (often more than full time.) Life has gotten pretty hectic and crazy, and we have just been trying to figure it out most days. Simple things like just making dinner became so hard, even though I had always been comfortable in the kitchen and LOVED to cook.

The first easy chicken bake I made wasthis Fajita Chicken Bake. I was amazed. It was so easy to make, and equally easy to clean up since it was all made in just one dish. But the best part is that despite how easy it was, it was still DELICIOUS and HEALTHY! I felt like I was finally winning at something.

So I did what I do best, and recreated it in many new flavor combinations (See all of my Baked Chicken Recipes here) Our family seems to love each new one even more than the last, and every once in awhile, I will be doing something totally random and all of a sudden a new chicken bake just hits me.

That is what happened here, and I am so glad it did, because it was a HUGE winner! I can’t believe I didn’t think of it sooner, because the BBQsauce, bacon and cheddar combo is pretty much a match made in heaven. It is like the power combo of savory dishes!

If you love this combo as much as me, read on, because here is the recipe + tips I have learned over the years to perfect the chicken bake.

Barbecue Bacon Chicken Bake + Tips

To start you only need 4 ingredients: {Full printable recipe at the bottom of the post}

• Boneless Skinless Chicken Breasts – I use Tyson which is affordable and easy to grab at any store I happen to be stopping by for groceries
• Barbecue Sauce– I used Kraft Original here and it had a great flavor. If you are BBQ sauce loyal, then use whatever your favorite is! This really gives good bit of flavor to the dish so make sure that you love what you use.
• Bacon– The flavor of the bacon combining with the BBQ sauce is the key to the over the top flavor in this dish so make sure you use AMAZING bacon. I usedJones Dairy Farm Cherrywood Smoked Bacon which has such a fabulous rich and smokey flavor that is the key to making such an easy dish still so full of delicious flavors.
• Sharp Cheddar Cheese– This just creates the trifecta between the sweet and tangy barbecue sauce and the rich and savory bacon. I usually use Kraft preshredded cheese because it is quick, easy and delicious! I really like sharp cheddar on this because the other flavors are so bold you need something that can hold it’s own and not get lost.

After publishing so many popular recipes for these chicken bakes, I have learned that you guys love the details. So I like to detail exactly what I use and why just so you can make the easiest decision for what is important or not, and what and you want to use. I will tell you though that this flavor combo is a winner. Now on to the how to.

I would say you could probably have this dinner from the fridge to the oven in about 10 minutes of prep. Forget boring freezer meals or crockpot meals for days on end when it is this easy to have a hot fresh meal on the table full of bold flavors and great textures.

All you do is:

1. Lay the chicken flat in a baking dish. If the chicken is extra thick you might want to butterfly it to reduce cooking time.

2. Spread the BBQ sauce over each chicken breast to cover.

3. Cut the bacon slices in half and put 2 pieces on top of each chicken breast.

4. Place the dish on the top rack of an oven preheated to 400F. Cook 30 min.

5. Remove from oven and cover with cheese. Return to oven on middle rack and cook an additional 5-15 minutes or until the chicken is no longer pink and the juices run clear.

I served the chicken over rice and my family, and especially the kids really like it this way. If you want to go low carb or a little healthier this would be great over spinach or other greens. Or if you want to go more with the barbeque twist, then you can serve it wonderfully with traditional barbecue sides like potato salad, cole slaw and a dill pickle. You could even put it on a bun and eat it as a sandwich!

The leftovers are equally as delicious and versatile! Chop it up for a killer salad to take for lunch the next day, or my family’s favorite, use the leftovers to make BBQ chicken nachos. Yup I said it. We eat nachos for dinner and I am not going to even apologize, because we pack them full of wholesome chicken and veggies and we LOVE them! You can get a recipe for one of our favorite versions on my Easy Family Recipes Instagram!

Tips on Making your Barbecue Bacon Chicken Bake

One of my most popular recipes on my site is my Bacon Ranch Chicken Bake. With the hundreds of thousands of people who have tried it and those that have been kind enough to leave comments and emails about their experience I have learned a few things that I would love to share with you.

How crisp do you like your bacon? If you like really crispy bacon, it is best to cook it separately from your dish. By cooking the chicken bake on the top rack at a fairly high heat, you do get the edges of the bacon crisp if you make it as directed. It is not super crispy all the way through though. For me, the convenience and flavor it adds to the dish as a whole is so worth it not being super crispy, but if you absolutely love it crispy, then you can place the dish on the middle rack to bake and put the bacon on a cookie sheet about the last 10 minutes of the cook time then add it on for far crispier bacon.

Mine took longer/shorter time to cook. Since I am not giving you a recipe by weight, cooking time can really vary on this dish. The things that play into cook time are the thickness of the chicken breasts you are using, the temperature and size of your oven (some ovens might run hotter or colder than the gauge tells you,) and the altitude and climate you live in. Since I have no way to factor in all of these variables for anyone except me, use the cook time as a guideline and check the dish as it gets closer to done to see how yours is cooking and whether it might need more or less time.

We like more of THIS or less of THAT. Wonderful! These dishes are very forgiving and really adapt well to your personal preferences. So if you like way more barbecue sauce or far less, go ahead and use your judgement on what you think you will like. Some people might like more or less bacon or cheese and that is totally fine too! Please don’t be afraid to adapt the dish to your personal preference.

Can I double, triple or half the recipe? Absolutely 100% yes! This recipe is very scalable so if you are looking for an easy dinner for 2 or want to triple the batch to feed a crowd it is super easy to do. I often buy a family pack of chicken and purposely double or triple the recipe so that I have leftovers to use to make into new meals throughout the week. This dish repurposes into new and exciting dishes absolutely beautifully to make future meal prep quick and easy too!

Is this freezer friendly? Yes… and no. Although you can prep this ahead of time raw as a freezer meal, I kind of feel like, what is the point? When you really get down to it, most things just taste better fresh, and this literally takes 1o minutes to get in the oven. With that said, I love to double or triple the recipe like I mentioned above, and then freeze the leftovers to use to make into new meals down the road, like the BBQ Chicken Nachos I mentioned earlier. Yum!

Grab the full recipe below and make sure that you follow me on Pinterest where I save my favorite recipes from across the web!