Creamy Mushroom Chicken is Sophisticated, but Simple

With notes of white wine, thyme, and garlic, this creamy mushroom chicken feels fancy, but is surprisingly easy to make. My recipe is ready in 40 minutes, so it’s a perfect weeknight dinner!

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Ingredients
Chicken
1 lb boneless skinless chicken breast, fileted or pounded flat (453g)
Salt
Pepper
⅓ cup all-purpose flour (41g)
2 Tablespoons avocado oil
Mushroom sauce
2 Tablespoons salted butter (28g)
12 oz sliced cremini/baby bella mushrooms (340g)
1 cup finely chopped yellow onion (140g)
1 Tablespoon minced garlic
1 Tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon dijon mustard
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
⅓ cup dry white wine (79ml)
2 sprigs fresh thyme ( may substitute ½ teaspoon dried thyme)
1 cup chicken broth (236ml)
⅔ cup heavy cream (158ml)

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Instruction
00:00 Introduction
00:15 Prepare the chicken. Season chicken all over with salt and pepper and dredge through the flour. Set aside.
01:42 Sear the chicken. In a large skillet, heat oil over medium/high heat, until shimmering. Once shimmering, add the chicken (cook the chicken in batches if needed, adding additional oil in between, to avoid crowding the pan) and cook on one side until deep golden brown (about 2-3 minutes). Flip chicken and cook on the other side until golden brown and chicken is cooked through Reduce heat if needed to avoid burning the chicken, but the goal here is to get a nice golden sear. Remove chicken to a plate and loosely tent with foil while you prepare the sauce.
03:07 Reduce skillet heat to medium and add the butter. Once melted, add mushrooms and cook, stirring occasionally, until golden.
04:08 Add onion and cook, stirring frequently, until softened, about 4 minutes.
04:48 Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds.
05:20 Sprinkle flour over the pan and cook, stirring until flour is absorbed, then cook another 30 seconds longer.
05:41 Stir in dijon mustard and sugar.
05:58 Add thyme and slowly drizzle in wine, cook until absorbed.
07:33 Add chicken broth, scraping the bottom of the skillet to work in any brown bits, and cook until the liquid is reduced by half.
08:20 Slowly drizzle in cream, stirring to combine.
08:35 Return chicken to the pan and cook until the sauce is thickened and chicken is warmed through (usually 5 minutes longer). Taste-test the sauce and add additional salt and pepper to taste (if it tastes bland at all, just a bit more salt will help!)

Notes
Storing
Store leftovers in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.

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Today, we are making a super flavorful, creamy mushroom chicken. This would make a good date night dinner. It’s also a pretty good weeknight dinner. A little more heavy lifting than, say, my barbecue chicken meatballs but, all things considered, a pretty straightforward and super flavorful dish. So for this recipe, we are going to be using a pound of chicken breast and usually those are pretty thick, so I’ve gone ahead and filleted these in half because we want them thinner or you can pound them to be thinner— either ones fine. On my counter I have a piece of wax paper here, just makes chicken prep a little bit easier. Makes clean up easier. Let me lay out my chicken. And before you cook your chicken, you’re going to want to just season it all over with salt and pepper. Be generous. If you don’t do enough salt and pepper on the chicken, you are just going to have to add more to the sauce later on, so just something to be aware of. Let’s get both sides. More salt. Freshly cracked salt and pepper just add something extra. It’s a little bit better than your average—fresher and better than your average, you know, salt shaker and pepper shaker. Then, we’re going to dredge the chicken through flour, so I’ve got like a third cup of all-purpose flour here and we’re just gonna dredge the chicken on both sides. While I do this, let me just pause for a second because I’m going to get my stovetop heating up a little bit, so I’m going to turn this to like medium heat—notch above medium actually. And that’s warming up. Let’s go ahead and finish dredging our chicken. And I want that chicken completely coated in the flour, but we’ll just shake off any excess. Beautiful. We’ll set that there. This is just regular all-purpose flour. When the weather starts to get colder and you know you want something like a little more cozy, a little more hearty, this is what I reach for and I usually serve it with my mashed potatoes, which I think I’ll do a video of those for you guys because that recipe has been on my website for a while, but I haven’t done a video for it yet. I’ll do one before Thanksgiving. Chicken’s dredged. Set that down. And we’re going to add some oil to our pan. We’re gonna add two tablespoons of a neutral cooking oil or olive oil would be fine as well. Get the bottom coated. You want that oil to be nice and shimmering before you go any further. A nice, hot pan is really important to get a nice sear on your chicken. So once we lay this chicken down, we’re not going to touch it for like 2, 3 minutes because we want it to get a nice, golden brown sear. That is going to pack in so much flavor. All right, so once the oils shimmering let’s set down our chicken. And if all of your chicken doesn’t fit in the pan, just do it in batches, like do two pieces of chicken at a time. Otherwise, you’ll overcrowd the chicken, and then you will end up with like a gray, steamed chicken, which is not going to give you that flavor I’m telling you about. All rihgt, let’s take a peek, see how our browning’s going. Remember, don’t disturb it more than you have to. No, we need to get a little browner than that. There you go, nice, golden browning. That’s what we want to see. After we flip them, we’ll cook them for a couple more minutes. Again, you want to have that nice, golden browning on both sides. And if you want to check that your chicken is done cooking, an instant read thermometer is great. You want to hit 165 degrees Fahrenheit. All right, and some of these are finishing a little sooner than the others just because they’re different sizes. So, as the chicken finish cooking, just remove it to a clean plate. We’ll let these guys have another second before we take them off. Another one. This is our most uncooperative piece. Alright, our last piece of chicken is done. We’re just going to set this to the side. I’ll usually tent it loosely with a little bit of foil, just that way it doesn’t get cold. I don’t like the foil touching it. That’s just me. And immediately we’ll— first, let’s turn our heat down just a notch to medium, and then we are going to immediately add 2 tablespoons of salted butter. Get this nice and melted in the pan. And once the butter is melted, we’ll add our mushrooms, so you’ll need 12 ounces of sliced mushrooms for this recipe. I recommend using a baby bella or cremini mushroom— probably saying that wrong. These are just a firmer mushroom. If you’re using something softer, like a white button mushroom, then it could get kind of like a little bit mushy. These are firmer, so I leave them in the pan the whole time I’m cooking everything. If you only had like a white button, I would probably remove them to a plate after cooking them, and then put them back in once you’ve made your sauce. So let’s go ahead and cook these mushrooms until they’re like a nice golden color. Just gonna cook these in the butter. That’s a big one. I’m not a big mushroom person, so I’ll usually give Zach the mushrooms from this dish, but they really do add a lot to the sauce, and I love the sauce that results from it. It has like a really, really nice flavor. Okay, once the mushrooms are starting to turn a nice, gold color, we’re going to add our onion, so I have a cup of small, chopped yellow onion here. If you want to be fancy, you could use a shallot instead. I’d probably just use like one whole shallot. I really do like a shallot in here. And we’re just going to cook this with the mushrooms until the onions are nice and softened, and it’s going to take like three to five minutes. Just stir them, move them around pretty frequently so they don’t burn. Get in there mushroom. If you keep them moving, the onions and the mushrooms will soak up, like, any brown bits on the bottom of the pan. Anything you don’t get, we’ll get later after we add the broth and things like that, but this is actually really nice for building flavor right into those veggies. Okay, so once our onions and mushrooms are nicely cooked, onions are softened, let’s go ahead and add our garlic. You’ll need a tablespoon of minced garlic, and, you can see, I made a little space for that garlic, and I’m going to add it right there, just to give it a moment of direct contact with the pan. And then, we’ll go ahead and mix it in. There we go. Add it with the mushrooms and the onion. And we’ll just cook this until it’s nice and fragrant. You know, garlic cooks really fast, so you don’t wanna burn it, so like 30 seconds, just keep it moving. And things should be smelling really good and they’re only gonna get better. Such a good rainy day—rainy Friday meal. I don’t know why it needs to be a Friday, but that just feels right. All right, next, we are going to add a little bit of flour, which is going to help like thicken things a little bit once we start adding our liquid. This is a tablespoon of all-purpose flour. Just sprinkle it over the veggies. And we’re going to cook it until that flour is all absorbed, and then we’re going to cook it another like 30 to 60 seconds longer, just to kind of toast it a little bit, which is good for developing flavor. Okay, once that’s nice, we’re going to add two small ingredients that make a big difference, starting with a teaspoon of granulated sugar. It helps build the other flavors of the dish, just a little bit of sugar does. We’re also going to add a teaspoon of Dijon mustard. We’ll see if I can get that all out of here. It’s such a small amount, I really don’t want to leave any behind. And normally I would add like two sprigs of fresh thyme here as well, but guess what I didn’t get from the grocery store? So instead, I’m going to use dried thyme. You’ll need a half teaspoon. We’ll go ahead and stir this together. I don’t want anything to start burning. Stir these ingredients in, just get them mixed in. All right, and the next thing we’re going to add is a third cup of a white cooking wine. You don’t want to—I don’t know why I shook it. You don’t need to shake it. If you don’t cook with wine, you can substitute this with a third cup of broth. So this is a Pinot Grigio. We’re just gonna add like a third cup. I’m going to add it gradually and scrape the pan as I cook it. And what I want to do is I want to cook this wine, I want to stir everything in the wine, and I want to cook it until the wine’s like all absorbed and all like cooked out of the dish. So, again, it cooks into the other ingredients. really develops the flavor, but the dish isn’t going to be swimming in actual wine. I’m really not a big wine drinker, as you can probably tell by how I am pronouncing the names of the wines—Pinot Grigio or Chardonnay would work well here —but, um, I love these like little wine bottles because you can get like a six-pack pretty inexpensively, they’re great for cooking with, and then you don’t feel bad about wasting a whole bottle if you don’t cook with wine all that much. And I’m scraping the pan as I go because I want those brown bits in the dish, not on the bottom of the pan. What a wasted opportunity, if you just leave them there. I feel like I need to stand over here while I’m talking to you because of all the steam. Can you see me? All right, little bit more. And let’s just cook this until it’s all absorbed. You don’t want your pan to be like super dry, you just don’t want, you know, if you tilt it, you don’t want there to be like a bunch of liquid there, so we’re in pretty good shape. I’m just going to cook it a couple seconds longer. Scrape that pan. Don’t worry, what we don’t get here, we’ll get in the next step. Okay, so once that wine’s absorbed, we’ll move on to our chicken broth. You’ll need a cup of chicken broth here. And again, I’m going to just drizzle this in and add it gradually, scraping the pan as I add it. And we’re going to cook the chicken broth until this has reduced a bit, usually by about like a third to a half. What we’re doing here is were concentrating the chicken broth flavor. And again, I talk a lot when I’m making savory dishes about building like the base because that’s how you get all that flavor, like these steps are important, even if they’re a little more time consuming. Thought my stove turned off. And reducing it isn’t an exact science. You do want to see that it’s like reduced and thickened, but the best way to do it is usually just to kind of like tilt the pan and just kind of eyeball how much liquid is there. And we’ll wash that dijon mustard off so it gets in our dish. All right, so once this is seeming like a little bit thicker and the broth has reduced some, about a third is what you’re aiming for, we’re going to add our final ingredient, except for that chicken over there. And this is 2/3 cup of heavy cream. We’re just gonna drizzle this in slowly. I’ve also tried this with half and half, and half and half and half works fine too. It just isn’t going to be as thick of a sauce. Let’s grab our chicken. We didn’t forget about that—this time. We’re just going to nestle our chicken right in the sauce, and I’ll turn down the heat a little bit. I just want this simmering at this point. And any juices on that plate, go ahead and add them right on in. Flavor in those…or in that. And we’re just going to let this cook until the sauce is slightly thickened. It doesn’t get super thick. It’s not like a gravy. Though the longer you let it sit, the thicker it will get. So we’re just going to let that chicken warm through all the way, snd then we’re going to go ahead and plate it. Like I said, I like to serve this over some mashed potatoes usually with like a green, veggie or a salad. Of course, don’t forget to get some of that mushroom sauce. Ugh, it’s so good with the potatoes. And that is it. That is how you make this creamy mushroom chicken. Whenever you want to serve it, it’s a super flavorful dish I think you’re going to love. If you try it, let me know what you think. I always really do love hearing from you. Oh yeah. I love it. Sorry, mushroom. Need the spoon. Evidently I like the essence of mushroom, but that’s it. Is this off or something? It’s off! Okay, stresses me out.