A super flavorful way to prepare fresh or frozen chicken breasts to use in chicken salads, soups, skillet meals, casseroles and other recipes.

Oven Poached Ready Chicken

Usually when folks need already cooked chicken for a recipe, they poach a couple of chicken breasts in a saucepan on the top of the stove. It's a quick and easy process when there isn't some already put up, or leftover from another meal. Sometimes we pick up an over-sized deli rotisserie chicken, just for the purpose of a quick meal on a busy day, with some intentional leftovers. Very often, however, those are heavily seasoned and super-salty, making them less adaptable for some recipes.

Several years back, a reader wrote to share with me a method of cooking those bags of individually quick frozen chicken breasts, that she and a friend had come up with. Although they used it for those smaller chicken breasts, I primarily use it for the larger, fresh chicken breasts, since those are the ones that I catch on sale and buy most often, for that very reason. I fell in love with the method, and when I want some chicken to put up, it's the preferred way for me to cook them now.