How To Make The Best Chicken Quesadillas

This recipe makes the ultimate chicken quesadilla: crispy, flavorful, and perfectly cheesy. You’ll never want to make them any other way.

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This isn’t the quesadilla that you make at 2 in the morning with a microwave. This is a real chicken quesadilla. We’re going to begin by marinating our chicken. To a bowl, I’m going to add some Mexican oregano, a bit of coriander, cumin, garlic powder, cayenne pepper, paprika, always one of my favorite ingredients, a bit of sugar to balance out all the acidity that we’re about to add in here. Then a little bit of soy sauce. That’s going to give us a nice kick of umami. Then I’ll slice two limes and add in all that juice. You can use a juicer if you want. Feels more satisfying to squeeze them by hand anyways. It’s no fun to use a juicer all the time. Then we also got an orange. Squeeze that in. Watch for any seeds. Then we’ll go in with a little bit of oil. And to finish, a pinch of salt. I’m going to give this a quick whisk. Make sure my whole marinade is well combined. I’m going to toss on a pair of gloves here. It’s an optional step, but it allows you to move faster in the kitchen. And then I’ll add in my chicken. These, by the way, if you didn’t recognize them already, are chicken thighs. The reason I often prefer chicken thighs over chicken breasts is because these have a lot more fat in them. So, they end up being a lot more tender and they’re actually harder to overcook. Now, I’m just going to get in there with my hands, mix this all around to make sure it’s fully coated. And once it’s fully submerged under my marinade, I’ll cover it up with plastic wrap, and bring it to the fridge to marinate while we prepare the rest of the components for our quesadillas. While our chicken’s marinating, we’re going to move into making our flour tortillas. You can certainly get storebought flour tortillas if you like, but similar to making fresh pasta at home, I think it’s a total game changer to make the tortillas yourself. To make these, we’re going to start in a bowl with some all-purpose flour, a sprinkle of salt, and some pork lard. If you can’t find pork lard or you want to use something different anyways, you can get shortening or you can even use butter. I’m going to give this a quick initial mix with my wooden spoon, just breaking apart some of that pork lard. And I want to see it start to form these little clumps. Once it starts looking somewhat like this, I’ll get rid of my spoon and get in there with my hands. The goal now is to press the fat and the flour together. You want to rub it through your fingers. This is really similar to making a pie crust. I used to help my great-grandmother once in a while to make pies. She lived till she was 101, so she was very good at making pies by then. And she taught me this technique of just sort of pushing and rolling through your fingers. And in this case, what this does, rubbing that flour into the fat, is give us a soft and flexible dough. During this process, it’s going to start to look and feel a little bit like a light fluffy sand. And if you’re doing it right, when you squeeze some of it together, it’ll actually hold its shape perfectly. Once our mixture looks like this, we’re going to go ahead and pour in some warm water. This water is not too hot, but it’s a nice warm, comfortable temperature with the goal now of turning it into sort of a play-doh. But first, it’s going to start to look a little shaggy like this. And it’s also going to start to get pretty heavy. I’m going to push this around the whole bowl now to make sure I pick up every piece. And now I can transfer it onto my work surface. At this final stage, we’ll knead it for about 2 to 3 minutes. This last step here is what’s going to give our tortillas that really nice chewy consistency. And once your dough starts to look something like this, where it’s not tearing when you’re kneading it, you’re good to go ahead and cut this up into portions. I’ve made enough dough here to make four flour tortillas. So, you can use a scale if you want, but I’m just going to eyeball it and try to cut this into four perfect portions. Before we let these rest for a little bit, I’m just going to ball each of them up. What you’re seeing here is a simple technique where the dough basically grips the bottom of your work surface and almost forms itself into a ball. And last but not least, I’ll toss them all into a plastic bag. You can also wrap them individually with plastic wrap. And we’ll let these sit off to the side for 20 to 30 minutes to rest. Our chicken’s marinating, our tortillas are resting, so let’s make a sauce. Really, you can make whatever kind of sauce you want, but for me, I’m thinking, how can we balance everything out? A chicken quesadilla is cheesy and fatty, so I want to cut down on all of that with something that’s slightly tangy, maybe a little bit acidic, and perhaps even a little bit spicy. So, here I have chipotle and adobo. And while I’m chopping, if you didn’t know what adobo is, it’s basically this smoky and tangy, slightly sweet tomato-based sauce that smells and tastes incredible. I’m going to chop these up almost into kind of a paste. I’m doing this on a mini cutting board because I don’t want to cut this heat into my main cutting board. I can also just toss this whole cutting board in the dishwasher after. Once this has been chopped up into a fine paste, I’m going to add this to my bowl along with some sour cream. You got to have sour cream somewhere when you’re having a quesadilla. A little bit of lime juice, a touch of garlic powder, but cover your ears if you don’t like cilantro. A nice big pile of cilantro. Obviously, if you’re one of those people where this tastes like soap, doesn’t mean you can’t make this recipe. Just use something else instead. You could grab some dill, some parsley. What matters most is that you find some nice fresh herbs that are going to bring some brightness to your dish. Once my herbs are chopped, I’ll add those in along with a pinch of salt to wake everything up. A tiny bit of honey. You could also use agave here if you prefer. And then I’ll mix this all together. And we should get this beautifully colored herb fil sauce. I actually want to thin it out just a little bit. So I’m going to grab the tiniest splash of water and add some of that in until it reaches the consistency that I like. My sauce is done. So, I’m going to cover it up and toss this in the fridge while we finish our last steps. To roll out our tortillas, I’m going to grab one at a time. Close the bag. Just keep letting them stay nice and happy in here. And I’m going to begin by tossing a tiny bit of flour onto my cutting board. We want to use just the slightest amount of flour, probably less than you even think. We’re actually going to start by pressing out our dough ball, similar to the way you’d start pressing out pizza dough. And the goal here is to get it into as round of a shape as possible. You may just be watching this video right now because you love watching cooking videos. But to those of you who are actually following along and making this right now already you’re doing an amazing job making your own homemade tortillas. So don’t be upset at yourself if they’re not perfectly round at the end because even mine probably won’t be perfectly round when I’m finished here. This is one of those things where you get it as close as you can and remember that it’s all going to taste the same either way. Once you’ve shaped it into a nice circle, go ahead and grab your rolling pin from the bottom all the way to the top. I’m going to do a nice smooth roll. Then I’ll lift and spin. And same thing on the other side. If you’re ever worried about things sticking, you can always add a bit more flour under your tortilla. But know that this is really all about the amount of pressure that you’re putting down in the rolling pin as you go. We’re just repeating this process back and forth. Rolling one way, then rotating, and then rolling another. One cool trick as well to get a continuous roll all the way through is to continue rolling all the way past your hands and let your arms help, too. That allows you to get that full range of motion all the way through the entire roll. As we roll, we’re going to continue to be more and more delicate with our tortilla. You’ve got to be very gentle as you lift it up and spin it or you will make fingerprints. This takes a lot of focus, but it’s actually really fun, especially if you can get it to look like a nice circle by the end. How do all the grandmas make this look so easy? I don’t get it. Once we’ve rolled our tortilla out nice and thin, you’ll see here that it’s hard to get it perfectly circular once it’s thin enough, but that’s okay. You’ll know that your tortilla is ready when you’ve rolled it out basically paper thin. And when it’s ready, I’ll turn up the heat to about medium high on a nice heavy wide bottomed pan. Be careful not to poke through it with your fingers and remember to work quick. The second you have it laid out like this, bring it right over to your pan and with no oil or anything, carefully drop it down. Immediately, bubbles like this are going to start to form. And that’s okay. That’s actually good. But if they start to get too big, like this one here, have a knife ready so you can pop them. These can ruin your quesadilla, and we don’t want that after all our hard work. Right now, I’m just carefully spinning, watching, and waiting for it to get nice and golden brown in the bottom. And then I flip. If I was just making these at home to eat by itself or if I wasn’t going to wrap it in something, I may not really care as much about popping those bubbles. But because this needs to be nice and relatively thin to wrap around our chicken quesadilla, we need to be careful about any massive, massive bubbles that could ruin the integrity of what we’re creating here. And when it looks like it’s done, I’ll grab it little bit hot. We got to be careful and toss it into my bag. I can leave the bag open, but this is going to keep it nice and soft and steamy and flexible. And while that sits and rests, we can roll out another same thing. Little bit of flour. And this time, I’m not going to make you wait. Magic. All this one needs are a few more clean rolls. And what I think it’s important to embrace about homemade tortillas is that they’re kind of like snowflakes where every single one is going to look different, and you just have to embrace that. Look at how thin this one is. You can see my entire hand through there. This one is now ready to go, too. I like sitting back for a second and watching all the bubbles form. Let’s see what happens here just for fun. If we don’t pop some of the bubbles, I want to see how big they get. This is an example of what’s going to happen to your tortilla. It’s going to turn into a pa instead. So, before we ruin it, pop, pop, pop. It’s not too late to still save this one. One very important thing to say as well, if you do have to pop any of those air bubbles, do not put your fingers over the steam after you pop it. You’re going to get really horribly burned. And steam burns are some of the worst burns I’ve ever experienced in the kitchen. We can add our second tortilla to the same bag. Slide that right in. And then the final step before we make the real quesadillas is cooking our chicken. I feel like people don’t think enough about the type of cheese that they’re going to use in their quesadilla. And before I even touch the cheese, I want to say one thing. Please don’t ever, under any circumstance, use pre-shredded cheese to try to make a quesadilla. All of those pre-shredded cheeses that you buy are going to have starches in them that make it so that the cheese doesn’t stick together. But it also makes it so that the cheese is really hard to melt. So, the very simple solution to that is to grate the cheese yourself. I’ve selected two different types of cheeses for my quesadilla. The first is wajaka cheese. This is a mild cheese that will give our quesadilla its meltiness and gooness. And for the other, I’ve selected cheddar cheese. The main reason is because I love the flavor of cheddar and it’s very customizable. You can get one that’s as mild or as sharp as you want. But the most important thing I want you to understand here is that you should have two different cheeses. One should be for melt and one should be for flavor. And together they combine to make something really amazing. So let’s start with our wajaka cheese. It might look like it’s in a ball similar to mozzarella, but really this cheese is a rope tied in one big knot. So once you move it around and loosen it all up, you can actually untie that rope. What’s cool is that it turns into this long piece of string cheese. So, you can start to grab and then pull some of those nice strands. And when you put a nice long piece of cheese like this in your quesadilla, that’s what’s going to give us that meltiness and that stringiness and that cheesiness that we want in terms of both the look and the texture. This cheese is just fun because it’s not one of those cheeses that you just throw right up against the grater. And it’s okay and totally normal that you’re going to get some smaller pieces like this as well, but just do your best to find those nice longer strands that you can peel right off the cheese because this will give a really fun texture in your quesadilla. Once we’ve torn all of our wajaka cheese into nice strands, I’ll toss them in a bowl. And then we can move to our cheddar. Instead of grating this way, I’m actually going to flip my cheddar up and grate the long way. That’s going to give us nice long strands instead of these shorter ones here. But what I’ll do now is I’ll tilt my grater. You can even toss down a kitchen towel if you want so that nothing slips. And I’ll go slowly and carefully down to make these nice long strands. I’m going nice and slow to make sure that I don’t cut my fingers. And what I’m left with are these crazy long strands of cheese. Doing this is not worth cutting your hand. So, I would only do this if you feel really comfortable and confident in the kitchen. Even for me, just so I don’t hurt myself, I’m going to save this as a little snack. I’m not going to try to grate the rest. But just check out some of those strands that we’re getting. I’m going to guess most of you have never seen a strand of cheese this long. But this is literally so long, it almost looks like spaghetti. And because I care so much about texture, I’m willing to take that extra step to make my cheese perfect. And gather this up into my bowl very carefully so I don’t break any of the strands. and we can start cooking. Our chicken has been sitting in this beautiful marinade for quite a while now. I’m doing all this to show you how you would make what I think is the perfect chicken quesadilla, but if you’re really in a time crunch, go buy a rotisserie chicken and then spice it up a little bit with something when you get home. That to me is going to be the second best way to get some fully cooked chicken that you can then make a really great chicken quesadilla with. What we’re going to do is come over here, get a nice heavy bottomed pan similar to one like this, so you can get really nice even heat distribution throughout. And then we’ll add in our oil. Make sure that whatever oil you’re going to use has a nice high smoke point so that it doesn’t burn cuz we’re going to be cooking at very high heat here. Once my oil starts to shimmer, I’m going to add in my chicken. Careful. I’m going to immediately weigh these down with some weight so that they really press against that pan, get nice hard contact and a nice hard crust and sear. And I also want to point out that I’m using more oil than most people would. And that’s because I like for the oil to be able to really get up there in all the nooks and crannies of the chicken to get it nice and perfectly crispy. Don’t be surprised when I turn these over in a minute if they have a nice dark char to them. We actually want to develop a nice dark crust. And that’s part of the reason that we have some soy sauce in here. If you’ve ever put soy sauce in a hot pan, you probably know that it burns very easily. But in this case, for me, it’s a nice kind of burnt. It’s going to give us that burnt char with soy sauce flavor. After a few minutes here, especially when I’m starting to see some of that really dark black char on the outsides there, I think our chicken should be ready to flip. And I’m going to flip in the order that we laid them down. See that dark char that I’m talking about? That’s perfect. Second piece. We’re getting just the right amount of char here. That one’s awesome. That might be my favorite one. I get how it may just look like it’s burnt and done incorrectly, but this really is going to be that flavor that we need to round out our quesadillas. It’s one of the things in here that gives us that difference between a good and a great quesadilla. While my chicken finishes cooking, I’m going to get my workstation ready to finish things up. I’m going to add it off to this bowl now where it’s going to rest. I’m going to bring in my griddle that I’m going to be cooking my quesadillas with. While that chicken rests for just a moment, I’m going to get ready to layer. What I’m about to do right now is the only time I am ever going to mention the words microwave and quesadilla in the same sentence. Going to wrap it in this damp paper towel and toss it in the microwave for just a few seconds to get it nice and soft so that we can bend it over itself without it cracking. Here it is. My nice steamy tortilla. See how it’s turned a bit different in color? Now it’s all floppy and loose. Much easier to work with. It’s not going to crack on me. While that remains nice and hot, going to grab my chicken. Probably just need about this much to fill in this side. I’m going to chop it into nice long strips like this. Mixing it all up with the size of the pieces and the texture. And then the way that we layer is by first putting down some of our cheddar. Remember, it’s only going to be on one half of the tortilla. Then a little bit of the wajaka cheese. Then down I go with some of my delicious fresh cooked chicken that’s still nice and piping hot. So, even now it’s going to sort of start to melt into that cheese and cook it even a little bit. Sometimes it’s nice to give it a little press as well. And then I’m going to go in reverse. I’m going to add some wajaka cheese. I’m making a cheese sandwich inside this quesadilla that’s going to essentially act as a glue to hold everything together. And now, finally, to finish it off, a little bit more of that cheddar cheese. Some people add all kinds of things. They add peppers, they add onions, they add whatever. I like to keep the quesadilla itself very simple. You don’t really need it or want it to be overflowing with all kinds of stuff. And that’s it. We fold it up, give it a nice press. I don’t have the filling coming all the way to the edges yet, cuz that’s going to happen while it cooks. And then in one swift motion, on we go. You may be a little confused here. Why is there no oil? I’m sure you and I have both had one or more of those quesadillas that are wet and soggy and disgusting and hard to even hold up, and that’s not right. So, with this recipe, there’s no need for that oil or that butter or anything there that’s going to soak up into that tortilla. All that fat is already inside the cheese in our quesadilla anyway, so we don’t really need anymore. Instead, I’m just going to weigh it down with a few of these presses for now and carefully monitor the heat as it cooks. That is one tricky part I will admit about making quesadillas, and that’s that they can burn like that. Every so often, I’m going to remove these weights. Right now, I’m just weighing it down to press everything together and make sure we’re getting even contact across the whole tortilla on the pan. And I’ll move it around a little bit to make sure that the tortilla is touching different parts of the pan at all different times. Since this pan, or any pan, is going to be hotter and colder in different spots. We’re getting a beautiful cheese crust here. It almost becomes an extension of the tortilla, which is pretty cool. I’m standing really close in an awkward position so you guys can get good audio of the cheese bubbling. Don’t say I never did anything for you. We’re ready to flip. So, I’m going to go carefully here right over the top. So, what we’ve done here is dried this side of the tortilla out for a while where if I knock it, it’s this really hard and crusty surface. And this is going to give us this amazing crunch when we go to bite into this quesadilla. Going to flip this guy around. One of my favorite parts in the whole thing, if you do this right, is the crispy edges of cheese that you get there that fall onto the pan and become this crunchy crispy bonus. Basically, look at this crispy piece of cheese that we got. This is the treat that I’m going to give myself. That looks pretty bomb, doesn’t it? Another cool thing here is even though we didn’t use any oil, see how much oil ends up on the pan? That’s all from the cheese. So, it ends up kind of making its own oil to cook itself in. And with that, we are done. I like my quesadillas in nice big pieces. So, I’m going to go into three big chunks like that. Sometimes it’s a bit of a game for me to see how long and beautiful of a cheese pull I can get. See what I meant by getting those nice long cheese strands? Put this all together with your beautiful sauce and perhaps some guacamole or whatever else you like and you have the perfect quesadilla. Nobody touch my quesadilla. That means you too, Darl.