The 3-Ingredient Chicken Dish That Features An Effortless Marinade

Chicken dinners, like any one of our 15 best chicken recipes, are popular because they're often easy to make, but we're about to make it even simpler for you with a 3-ingredient chicken dish that features an effortless marinade. The three ingredients are chicken, barbecue sauce, and Italian dressing. Two condiments, as you can imagine, join together as a marinade, but how does it all work?

Barbecue sauces are often full of robust flavors, umami, a hint of spice, and sweet notes. The vinegar in Italian dressing adds acidity to the marinade and helps break down and tenderize the chicken meat. Additionally, there is fat and salt in Italian dressing, which helps kick up the savoriness in the marinade. Italian dressing is so versatile in the kitchen — in fact, Italian dressing is the simple secret for better beef stew as well.

Then you have your chicken, which will absorb the marinade with ease. Choose any cut of chicken you prefer, be it dark or white meat. Then, make the marinade: a mix of barbecue sauce and Italian dress in a 1:1 ratio. That means for every cup of barbecue sauce, you'll mix in a cup of Italian dressing to make this simple marinade.

Next, coat and soak the chicken thoroughly with our simple and effortless marinade; let the chicken marinate for at least two hours. You can also leave the chicken to absorb the marinade in the refrigerator overnight. Then, grill the chicken for the best and juiciest barbecued chicken with tender meat. Finally, use any extra marinade to glaze the chicken while grilling.

Alternatively, you can roast the chicken in the oven with a grill plate. This will give the impression you had barbecued the chicken. A drop of liquid smoke in the marinade would enhance the barbecue flavors. Now, if you don't know where to begin with barbecue sauces, Tasting Table has ranked 15 popular barbecue sauce brands. Bachan's Japanese Barbecue Sauce tops our list with its delicious Asian-inspired flavors. As for Italian dressing, we have a formula for you for the best vinaigrette salad dressing and the go-to vinaigrette that Julia Child swore by.