This honey mustard chicken recipe is a simple skillet meal made with chicken breast, bell peppers and onions cooked in a homemade honey mustard sauce. It’s easy to make, full of flavor, and perfect for a healthy weeknight dinner or for meal prep.
The sauce is made from scratch using Dijon mustard, honey, Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, and a splash of balsamic vinegar. The result is a bold, balanced flavor with sweet, tangy, and slightly spicy notes.
I almost always serve this dish over rice, which soaks up the extra honey mustard sauce and turns the chicken and vegetables into a complete meal that’s balanced, healthy, and high in protein.
Why This Honey Mustard Chicken Recipe Is So Easy To Make
This honey mustard chicken recipe is so simple, it’s hard to mess it up, even if you change the ingredient amounts. Use a little less chicken, add more peppers, increase the onions, throw in extra vegetables, increase the sauce amount, etc.
If you love onions, you can easily bump them up to 3/4 cup or even a full cup. That bulks up the meal and lets you serve it with a little less rice while still keeping the same volume of food on your plate.
It’s also quick to make. From start to dinner plate takes about 25 minutes, maybe 30 if you’re a slow chicken and veggie chopper. That makes it perfect for a fast weeknight dinner.
This recipe is also great for meal prep. You can batch cook flavorful protein while getting a serving of vegetables at the same time with the bell peppers and onions.
I’ve made this honey mustard chicken so many times I’ve lost count. It’s a regular in my dinner and meal prep rotation, and I’ve fine-tuned the cooking method over the years. Like I said, you can’t really mess this one up, but there are a couple small tricks that make the final result even better.
Cooking Tips For A Perfect Honey Mustard Skillet
1. Use the best cookware
In my opinion the best cookware for a recipe like this is the enameled cast iron casserole dish that you see in the photo (mine is a Lodge). But if you don’t have one a Dutch oven would also work (same thing but with much higher sides). A large 12″ stainless steel skillet would probably work as would a large nonstick skillet with high enough sides.
2. Don’t add the garlic too early.
If garlic goes into a hot pan too soon, especially at medium-high heat, it can burn quickly and turn bitter. I usually cook the onions first by themselves, stirring so they don’t burn, then add the garlic and immediately add the chicken.
3. Add the bell peppers later.
In many recipes, peppers are added too early and end up overcooked and soft. They also lose their bright color when cooked too long.
For this recipe, I cook the chicken completely first, and only then add the peppers near the end so they cook for a shorter time.
I usually add the green peppers last, which keeps them crisp-tender and bright green instead of soft and dull.
Use Lots Of Onion And Bell Pepper To Increase Food Volume (Without Adding Many Calories
One of the easiest ways to make meals more satisfying during a fat-loss phase is simply adding more vegetables.
Bell peppers work perfectly in this honey mustard chicken recipe because they add a lot of food volume while contributing very few calories.
I usually use two peppers – one red and one green. The combination looks great on the plate and gives the dish a nice color contrast.
If you’re trying to stretch the recipe further or make it even more filling, adding a third pepper (yellow works great) is an easy way to do it.
Don’t Worry About Weighing Bell Peppers
For practical cooking, I rarely bother weighing fibrous vegetables like bell peppers. I simply buy large peppers and use the whole thing.
Even if your pepper is a little bigger or smaller, the calorie difference is insignificant.
When you’re watching calories closely for fat loss, the foods that matter most to measure carefully are:
• fats like cooking oils
• sugars like honey
• starchy carbs like rice
Those ingredients add calories quickly, while vegetables like peppers barely move the needle.
The Homemade Honey Mustard Sauce
You can certainly make this recipe with a bottled honey mustard sauce from the store if you’re in a hurry. But if you have a couple extra minutes, the homemade sauce is absolutely worth it.
It’s simple to mix together and the flavor is much better than most store-bought versions. The Dijon mustard gives it a bold mustard flavor, while the honey adds sweetness and the balsamic vinegar brings a subtle tang. Worcestershire sauce and a little ketchup round everything out.
Honey Mustard Sauce Ingredients:
• 3 Tbsp Dijon mustard
• 1 Tbsp ketchup
• 1 Tbsp pure honey
• 2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
The result of this mixture of ingredients is a sauce with sweet, tangy, and slightly savory notes that pairs perfectly with chicken and vegetables. It’s delish!
This recipe above makes just enough sauce for one batch as indicated in the instructions below.
Feel free to scale it up a bit if you want though, especially if you want enough sauce to really mix into the rice too. If im not that that often as you can see in the pic above.
Thickening The Sauce (Optional But Recommended)
Sometimes a sauce tastes great but ends up too thin and drains down between the meat and vegetables. My sauce recipe is not a thick honey mustard – that’s a different kind.
For this reason, I like to thicken this somewhat thin honey mustard sauce at the end of cooking. This helps it coat the chicken and peppers so you get flavor in every bite.
To do this, mix 1 tablespoon cornstarch with 2 tablespoons of cold water until it completely dissolves. Once the chicken and vegetables are cooked, pour the slurry into the skillet and stir.
Within a minute the sauce thickens and beautifully coats the chicken and vegetables.
Don’t overcook it. As soon as the sauce thickens, remove the skillet from the heat and it’s ready to serve.
Serving Suggestions And Macros
If you’re eating a balanced macro diet, this honey mustard chicken goes great with rice. You can easily adjust the rice portion depending on your calorie budget and macro targets.
Since this recipe makes four generous servings, I usually cook 1 cup of uncooked rice, which yields about 3 cups cooked. That comes out to roughly 3/4 cup cooked rice per serving with the chicken and vegetables. (Four servings per batch).
If you use white rice, the total prep and cooking time stays under 30 minutes. Brown rice takes longer in the rice cooker, so start the brown rice before you start the chicken and veggies if you want everything finished at the same time.
Served with the rice portion above, this meal comes out to about 454 calories per serving, which is surprisingly filling thanks to the chicken and vegetables. It’s a generous portion. If you’re a light eater, this batch could easily stretch to five servings.
When I’m on a muscle-building program, I simply increase the rice portion until I’m at around 600 calories.
If you’re keeping carbs lower, you can also enjoy the chicken, peppers, and sauce by themselves. Here are the macros without the rice:
Calories: 297
Protein: 39.5 g
Carbs: 17 g
Fat: 6.9 g
Recipes like this are easy to scale and customize.
And if you like adjusting ingredients or creating your own variations, the Burn the Fat Meal Planner software inside the Burn The Fat Inner Circle isn’t just for planning meals – it’s fantastic for building and customizing recipes too.
Enjoy!
Tom Venuto,
Author of Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle
Author of Burn The Fat Guide To Meal Prep For Fat Loss
Founder of Burn the Fat Inner Circle
To browse hundreds of Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle recipes, CLICK HERE (members only)
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Honey Mustard Chicken Skillet With Peppers And Onions
Ingredients
- 680 g chicken breast, boneless, skinless (24 oz)
- 2 tsp olive oil, extra virgin
- 80 g onion, diced (about 1/2 cup)
- 1 large green bell pepper
- 1 large red bell pepper
- 3 cloves garlic, fresh, minced (1 Tbsp)
- 1/2 tsp salt (or to taste)
- 1/2 tsp black pepper
- 1 Tbsp cornstarch, for thickening sauce (stir into 2 Tbsp water to make slurry)
- 3 Tbsp dijon mustard
- 1 Tbsp ketchup
- 1 Tbsp honey
- 2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
- 1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
Instructions
- Get the rice started in rice cooker (allow extra time if using brown rice).
- Mix all the ingredients for the sauce in a bowl or Pyrex cup.
- Mince garlic, dice onion, and chop peppers.
- Chop chicken into bite size cubes or pieces. Season with salt and pepper.
- Add two teaspoons of olive oil to a large skillet or dutch oven and heat to medium high.
- Cook onions about 2 to 3 minutes or until they begin to soften. Stir occasionally to avoid burning.
- Add garlic. Add chicken breast. Cook chicken until browned, stirring regularly, about 4 to 5 minutes.
- Add bell peppers and stir.
- Pour the sauce into the skillet and stir in with the chicken and vegetables.
- Add one tablespoon of corn starch to a small bowl, add two tablespoons off water and mix until it dissolves to make a slurry for thickening the sauce.
- Add corn starch slurry to the skillet and stir until it thickens (about a minute). Remove from heat and serve.
Nutrition
About Tom Venuto
Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilding and fat loss expert. He is also a recipe creator specializing in fat-burning, muscle-building cooking. Tom is a former competitive bodybuilder and today works as a full-time fitness coach, writer, blogger, and author. In his spare time, he is an avid outdoor enthusiast and backpacker. His book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle is an international bestseller, first as an ebook and now as a hardcover and audiobook. The Body Fat Solution, Tom’s book about emotional eating and long-term weight maintenance, was an Oprah Magazine and Men’s Fitness Magazine pick. Tom is also the founder of Burn The Fat Inner Circle – a fitness support community with over 52,000 members worldwide since 2006. Click here for membership details
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