High Protein Chicken Potato Bake | Comfort Meal Prep

[0:00]Meal prep shouldn't feel like leftovers, so today I'm going to show you how to do a chicken potato bake. A beautiful combination, it tastes incredible, it's high protein, and it stores and reheats incredibly well, and it feels like a dinner that you can eat throughout the week. This right here is everything we need for today's recipe, plus the additions of oil, salt, and pepper. Now, we're using chicken thigh for this recipe because it maintains moisture and it reheats really well. What I have here is 900 grams or 2 pounds of boneless and skinless chicken thigh. I'm just going to slice this into about three strips lengthways, rotate, and then dice into small bite-size pieces. The smaller the better for this recipe because it is going to be layered into a bake, so we don't want the larger chunks. Now, I do know some people prefer chicken breast over chicken thigh. It can be used for this recipe, but I don't recommend it if you can just because it comes a lot drier and it doesn't really reheat as well. Get the chicken into a mixing bowl. Add in 1 teaspoon of garlic powder. Season it with salt. A little bit of cracked black pepper, about 10 cracks worth. And then give this a quick mix around, just make sure everything is combined and none of it's stuck together. You can add all of your favorite seasonings to this as well. You don't have to just add what I've added, just go for what you like. Now, with the chicken, get a large pan over a high heat and get the pan nice and hot. Add in 1 teaspoon of olive oil. And depending on the size of your pan and the strength of your burner, we want to do this in batches. I'm just going to add about half of that chicken in there. Spread it out so it's not sitting on top of one another and just let this sit for about 2 minutes to build up a crust. If we overcrowd the pan, everything's going to steam and you're not going to get a nice color on the chicken. After a couple of minutes, start mixing this around. That crust will have started to form, and we're going to cook this for a further 2 minutes. We're not cooking it all the way through here. What I'm actually doing is just removing a little bit of the moisture, especially if you buy supermarket chicken, sometimes it can be pumped with water just to increase the weight, which in my opinion is really bad anyway. But all we're doing is eliminating that, because if we do add a lot of moisture into our potato bake, then it's going to become soggy and you're not going to get a nice crust. Now, all we're looking for is something that looks like this, a little bit crusted, most of that moisture is evaporated, it's not fully cooked, and we can place this into a bowl, repeat with the remaining batch, and then just allow this to rest for about 5 to 10 minutes. While the chicken's resting, we're going to need 1 kilo or 2.2 pounds of potatoes. You can leave the skins on for extra nutrition and flavor, or you can just remove them, up to you. What I'm going to do with this is slice these into thin strips, about 2 to 3 millimeters in size. And if you're not comfortable doing this and you have a mandolin, you can use that instead. When you get to that end piece, just move these out the way. I like to lay it flat, place my fingers on the top, and then just use the knife and go through the side, just slice it into those nice strips as well, just so we have accuracy, and we want everything to cook at the same rate. Just one thing to note with these, if you have happened to cut them a little bit thicker, they will take longer to cook than what the instructions are in this video. So just make sure you keep an eye out for that. With the potatoes, all we need to do is season them with a little bit of salt. About 10 cracks worth of black pepper, mix them around, and that's all we need to do with these. And like I said with the chicken, you can add all of your favorite seasonings to these as well. For our cream sauce, we're going to add 300 grams or one and a quarter cups of thickened cream, or even whipping cream, or cooking cream. Add in 150 grams or half a cup of cream cheese. You can use light variants if you want to. Add in half a teaspoon of smoked paprika. Grate in three cloves of garlic, using a microplane to create a paste. Scrape all of that in there. And I'm going to add in about five cracks of black pepper. Grab a whisk, and then mix all of this together, mainly concentrating on breaking up that cream cheese and garlic. And just make sure everything is nice and combined and smooth. Once it's all combined, you'll have a nice thick cream sauce like so. We can just pop this aside for the time being. Now, into a baking dish, I'm just going to lightly spray this with a little bit of extra virgin olive oil. You can also use butter. Depending on how neat you want to be with this, we can start laying the potatoes. I like to slightly overlap them a little bit. You can just tip this in and then spread it out. And all we're doing here is just making sure that we cover the bottom of our dish with potatoes. Now, with our chicken, we're not actually going to be using the resting juices in this one. You can save them and use them for something else, but for this, I'm going to add in about half of that chicken, just straight over the top of the potatoes and just spread it out so it's not all clumped up or sitting in one location. Grab the cream cheese mix and then we're going to add half of that over the top, just spreading it out evenly. And I like to use the back of a spoon and just make sure it's all completely spread out. What we're going to do then is just repeat that same process until you have used all of the ingredients. And my final layer is going to be chicken and then the last of that cheese sauce, but you can put potatoes on the top if you have enough of them. Once it's all layered out, cover this with a little bit of foil, just make sure everything's nice and tight, and we're going to bake this in our oven for about 30 minutes with that foil on. Now, while that's cooking away, we can grate our cheese. I've got 120 grams here or about 1 and a quarter cups of fresh mozzarella. I'm just going to grate this on the larger side of a box grater to get those nice big pieces, and you can use store bought for this if you wanted to just to save a little bit of money or if you can't get fresh mozzarella. Along with the mozzarella, we're also going to need 40 grams or about a quarter of a cup of parmesan cheese, and this can also be grated. I like to use a microplane for this just to make it smaller and it melts a lot easier when it's grated like this. Again, you can use store-bought if you prefer. Once they're both grated, just give them a little mix around together to combine, and we can place these into a bowl. Now, lastly, as an optional ingredient, just a little bit of flat leaf parsley that I'm going to roughly chop. No exact weight and only use it if you have it. I'm going to be using this as a garnish, so I'm just going to break it down slightly, just so there's no large leaves or stems, only something that looks like this. All right, this has now been in the oven for about half an hour, so we'll just carefully remove that foil. At this point, we'll grab our cheese mix and just layer this over the top, spreading it out evenly and completely covering that surface. Once that's done, we can place this back into the oven for about 15 minutes, just until that cheese is melted, it's golden, and it's formed a nice crust. Now, after 15 minutes, we have that beautiful golden crust on the top. I really do recommend letting this cool down for at least half an hour before trying to cut it up. You can place this in the fridge overnight and let it completely firm. It's going to be a lot easier to slice, but for the purpose of this video, I will just let it sit a little bit. Slice it up so you can see what it looks like hot. Now, with this, I'm going to get six portions out of it, and we're going to layer them out into each individual container. You can weigh it so each individual one is exactly the same size or you can just go by eye, which is what I'm doing. And you're going to have a little bit of sauce left over and maybe a little bit of chicken or potatoes that might have fallen out along the way. Just make sure you evenly distribute them between the five containers. I like to add a touch more cracked black pepper per container as well as finishing it off with a little bit of flat leaf parsley, which is completely optional. We've already let them cool down before slicing, so we can place the lid straight on. And these will last 4 days in the fridge and 4 months in the freezer. For reheating, a microwave's going to be your best bet. Just reheat them for about 3 minutes, just give them a little quick stir halfway through. And with everything said and done, there's one thing left to do, and that is we can then dig in. It's everything you imagine it's going to be. It's creamy, it's rich, the chicken is nice and soft and tender. You've got that beautiful golden cheese crust on the top and then that sauce is really nice as well. Absolutely delicious dish, and I cannot wait for you guys to try it.