Sheet Pan Teriyaki Chicken Recipe

You can never have too many time-saving meals in your repertoire. While they're often praised as being great for weeknights, they may actually be better for weekends since things can get even busier then. As recipe developer Deniz Vergara tells us about this sheet pan meal, "This recipe makes it so easy to make chicken teriyaki." The fact that you're cooking the meat along with a side of green beans in the same pan, she says, makes for "minimal mess and cleanup involved."

While this recipe involves making teriyaki sauce from scratch, it's not too difficult to do and requires just seven ingredients. "If you are in a pinch," Vergara allows, "you can use store-bought," but the homemade sauce, unlike most store-bought ones, needs no cornstarch or other thickeners. Instead, Vergara assures us that "the sauce thickens as it cooks in the oven." It is also something you can keep on hand to use in other stir-fries and similar dishes.

For the homemade teriyaki sauce, you'll be using soy sauce, brown sugar, rice vinegar, mirin, garlic, ginger, and salt. The chicken used in this recipe is boneless, skinless thighs sliced into strips. For a vegetable side, you'll need some green beans, and you'll also need a little olive oil to grease the pan. Once the teriyaki chicken and beans are done, you can then dress them up with a sesame seed/sliced scallion garnish.

Preheat the oven to 400 F. As it heats up, stir together the soy sauce, sugar, vinegar, mirin, garlic, ginger, and salt. Remove ¼ cup of this teriyaki sauce and set it aside for just a moment.

Toss the chicken with the teriyaki sauce, then toss the beans with the set-aside ¼ cup of sauce. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, then rub the paper with the olive oil. Spread the chicken and beans over the pan in a single layer, making sure not to crowd them. If you have a very small sheet pan, you may need to supplement it with an extra baking pan.

Bake the chicken and beans for about 15 minutes. Once they are done, the chicken should be entirely cooked with no pink inside. The beans, Vergara says, should be "tender but not mushy."

Before you eat the teriyaki chicken, you can sprinkle it with the sesame seeds and sliced scallions. While the meat and green vegetables alone will make for a light, low-carb meal, you can also bulk up your plate with some noodles or rice for extra sustenance.