Garlic Onion Chicken – Succulent pan-fried chicken smothered in a flavorful and robust garlic onion sauce, this is a weeknight winner! It’s quick and easy, and utterly satisfying. Since everything cooks in one pan, clean-up is a breeze too.
Over the years, I’ve gathered enough recipes that are delicious yet simple enough to make any day of the week. These weeknight meals, my true heroes, nourish my family and allow us to have a special time together every night. I am thankful for them, and one of my recipe keepers is this one-pan Garlic Onion Chicken (鶏肉のガーリックオニオンソース). It’s our all-time favorite chicken dinner that boasts crispy skin, juicy meat, and an amazing sauce. I hope it will be your weeknight dinner superhero too!
Table of Contents
Why You’ll Love This Recipe
It’s quick! While the chicken marinates, you can make steamed rice or a quick side dish (I just tossed together a simple green salad with heirloom tomatoes). When everything else is ready, cook the chicken and serve.
It’s easy! This is one of the first dishes that I learned when I started cooking. With very basic ingredients and a minimal approach, it doesn’t get much easier. So yes, you can make it too.
It’s delicious! The criteria for good weeknight recipes have to be more than just quick and easy. If the final dish is not satisfyingly tasty, there’s no reason to keep cooking it. That’s not the case with this Garlic Onion Chicken. It’s so good that I never cease making it for my family.
3 Cooking Tips
I believe small care and attention to detail make a difference in the food you make. And it reflects your love in the most delicious way. Here are 3 tips that I recommend for making perfect garlic onion chicken!
1. Prick Chicken Skin with Fork
For this dish, I recommend using skin-on chicken thighs for better flavor and juicy meat. If you live in the US, skin-on-thighs typically include bone. You can always ask the butcher to remove it for you (they debone so fast!).
The skin, however, prevents the sauce from absorbing. So we help facilitate the marination by pricking the skin with a fork a few times.
2. Save the marinade for later
When I first started cooking on my own, I had a different assumption that the ingredient should be cooked together with the marinade so that it will become more flavorful. For some food, that may work, but not when you want to have nicely seared meat.
If you add the sauce to the frying pan together with the chicken, it ends up simmering the meat in the liquid. The chicken will never get crispy brown or any grill marks on the skin. Therefore, remove the marinate the best you could, pan-fry until golden brown, and then add the sauce to simmer down.
3. Spoon the sauce over the chicken
It is a basic tip, yet so easy to overlook. As the sauce simmers down and thicken, spoon it over the chicken several times. This allows the meat to absorb all the wonderful flavors. Even if you’re just making dinner for yourself, put your heart and soul into making it. Small care makes a difference in the end!
The Luscious Garlic Onion Sauce
If you have never grated onion for your marinade, you might be surprised by the power of this allium. It not only gives a refreshing taste, but it adds natural sweetness to the sauce.
Here, I used four cloves of garlic, which may be a little unusual in Japanese recipes, but don’t be afraid to use them. Each chicken thigh gets one garlic clove, so it’s not too bad.
We only marinate for 20-30 minutes and you may wonder if that’s enough. Don’t worry. You will be using the marinade to simmer down later and coat the chicken with this delicious sauce. The chicken will get plenty of flavor from cooking in the sauce, so you don’t need to marinate overnight. Your chicken may end up too salty, so be careful.
Other Quick, Easy, and Delicious Chicken Recipes
If you love Garlic Onion Chicken and want to try similar recipes, here are some of my recommendations. Enjoy!
Wish to learn more about Japanese cooking? Sign up for our free newsletter to receive cooking tips & recipe updates! And stay in touch with me on Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram.
Garlic Onion Chicken
Ingredients
- 4 boneless, skin-on chicken thighs
- ½ tsp Diamond Crystal kosher salt
- ½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
- 1 Tbsp neutral oil
Instructions
- Gather all the ingredients.
- Slice 4 cloves garlic and put them in a large container or bowl (I used an 8 x 8 inch or 20 x 20 cm baking dish).
- Peel ½ onion but don‘t cut off the root section as it‘s easier to grate when the layer is connected. Using a grater (my favorite is this one), grate as much as you can, keeping the juice (I left 30% of it—it’s hard to grate everything).
- To the garlic, add the grated onion with juice, 4 Tbsp sake, and 2 Tbsp mirin.
- Add 3 Tbsp soy sauce and mix it all together.
- With a fork, prick the skin of 4 boneless, skin-on chicken thighs. This will help absorb the marinade.
- Season the chicken with half of the ½ tsp Diamond Crystal kosher salt and half of the ½ tsp freshly ground black pepper on the skin side.
- Season the other side with the remaining salt and freshly ground black pepper.
- Add the chicken and keep in the refrigerator for 20–30 minutes to marinate.
- In a non-stick frying pan, heat 1 Tbsp neutral oil on medium heat. When the pan is hot, add the chicken, skin side down. Make sure to leave the marinade behind; the sauce will burn quickly, so do not add at this time.
- Be sure to add all the garlic.
- Pan-fry the chicken until the skin side is nicely golden brown, about 3 minutes. Do not flip until then.
- After you flip over the chicken, lower the heat to medium low. Put the lid on, leaving slightly ajar, and cook for 6–7 minutes.
- Remove the lid and see if the chicken is cooked through (the internal temperature should be 165ºF or 74ºC). If the chicken is done, wipe off the excess oil with a paper towel. Then, add the reserved marinade into the pan.
- Simmer on medium-low heat for 2–3 minutes. Use a spoon to coat the chicken with the pan sauce.
- When the sauce has been reduced and thickens slightly, turn off the heat. Serve the chicken on a plate and pour the sauce over. Serve immediately.
To Store
- You can keep the leftovers in an airtight container and store it in the refrigerator for up to 3–4 days or in the freezer for up to a momnth.
Nutrition
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on May 2, 2011. The post has been updated with new images and content in November 2019.
Just made this… sooooooooooooo good (i didn’t have sake so I used rice wine vinegar (was still great)
Hello, Ellen! Thank you for trying Nami’s recipe!
We are glad that you enjoyed the dish. If you do not have sake the next time, try dry sherry or Chinese rice wine instead. As a result, the dish will have less vinegary flavor. Nevertheless, we believe additional vinegar flavor is also good. Happy Cooking!
My second dish from this website. Again, it was awesome. I think I will try to make all of the dishes from this website! Thank you for the recipe!
Hi Thu! Thank you for trying Nami’s recipes and for your kind feedback!
We hope you enjoy making many yummy Japanese dishes from our site! Happy Cooking! 🧑🍳
I made this recipe, and it was great! ^__^; haha I could not make crispy chicken skin. I think I overcrowded the pan and there was a little bit of sauce/marinate in it; maybe too much? Anyway! It still tasted wonderful, so I think for a first try, this is a good thing!
Hi Stormer! Thank you very much for trying Nami’s recipe!
To make this chicken crispier, Please try to cook the chicken more at Step 14. Then add the sauce to simmer it down on medium-low heat for 2-3 minutes next time.
Nami mentioned “3 Tips to Make Perfect Garlic Onion Chicken” in this post, and we hope this is helpful.
Happy Cooking!
I made this for my wife and me and we enjoyed every bit. It was very savory with an overall great flavor. We love it. We’ll be making it again soon.
Hi Fish! Thank you very much for trying Nami’s recipe and for your kind feedback!
We are so happy to hear you and your wife enjoyed this dish!🙂
I’ve never had chicken this moist in my life. This cooks so well!!!!
Hi CHRISTINE! We are so happy to hear you enjoyed moist chicken!
Thank you very much for trying Nami’s recipe and for your kind feedback!
Simple and tasty for a speedy weeknight dish. So nice that you give exact times and instructions for the cooking. I used chicken thigh without the skin which worked well. Had it with cauliflower rice with loads of mixed mushrooms and green beans. Will certainly have it again!
PS: as you raved about it on one of your other posts I pickt one of these graters when I saw it cheap. Wow – I used to hate grating ginger and now I love it – even grating the onion was fun. Thank you for that tip!!
Hi Afra! Thank you very much for trying Nami’s recipe and for your kind feedback!
We are glad to hear that you enjoy this dish and ginger grater! 😁
Hi! I am a pretty decent cook, but I managed to mangle this recipe horribly! I want to try it again, because your pictures look beautiful and the reviews are amazing, so I have some questions for you: do you rinse and pat each thigh after marinating them and before cooking them? I shook off as much marinade as possible, but it wasn’t enough – the marinade remaining on the skin burned, and the skin did not crisp. Also, your directions indicate we should add the sliced garlic to the marinade, but then also add them to the hot oil around the same time as the chicken? I tried to pull out some pieces of garlic from the marinade as quickly as I could, but I didn’t get many clear of marinade in time to cook them long enough (though the few slices I added at the same time as the chicken burned). Ultimately, we did not get any of the garlic flavor, and I had to discard the soggy skin, which is a shame because crispy chicken skin is amazing! I clearly messed this recipe up big time, but I tried to carefully follow each step and study your pictures. Any help would be much appreciated.
Hi Sara,
Thank you very much for trying this recipe. We are sorry to hear your chicken didn’t turn out great this time.😔
Here are some tips that may help next time.
After you marinate the chicken, you do not need to rinse or pat dry the meat. You may pick up the meat from the marinade dish, let the marinade drip on the dish, and then place it on an oiled medium heated frying pan. If you use high heat, the skin and garlic will be burnt quickly and don’t have time to achieve crispy skin, so make sure to use medium heat to low-medium heat.😉
If you would like more strong garlic flavor, you may marinate the meat a little longer as well.
We hope this is helpful, and you will give this recipe a try again.
Made this after someone said that the sauce is basically “narcotic”. Definitely super delicious and easy! I cheated and blended the onion instead of grating it to save time, and cooked the chicken in a sous vide also to save active time, seared the chicken afterwards and reduced the sauce separately. Will definitely make this into a weekly rotation!
Hi Jeannie! Haha thank you so much for trying this recipe! Sous vide chicken makes it all juicy and easy to freeze too! Thanks so much for trying my recipe!
OMG of course I had to come check this one out… love garlic and onion lol! 😄 And as always this recipe looks amazing and easy to do I think I might make this week when it’s my turn to cook! Thanks for sharing Nami!
Hi Mariko! Haha! I hope you enjoy this recipe! 🙂
can I marinate the chicken a day in advance?
Hi Melba! You “can”, but most Japanese recipes don’t really marinate the meat for more than 30 minutes because we believe the taste of the actual ingredients is important and with the heavy marination, it won’t shine through. So… it’s up to you. 🙂
I think the taste was fabulous, but I didn’t cook the onions with the sauce bcs did not want the sauce to have many bits in it. So I strained the sauce after marinating, cooked the chix and added the sauce (w/o onions) to the chix. It seemed a bitwatery so after simmering for a few minutes, I removed the chix pieces and reduced the sauce u til it was thick, poured that over the completed dish. Voila! Merci NAMI san!
Hi Jill! Thank you for your kind and detailed feedback! I’m glad you enjoyed the recipe and thank you for trying this recipe!
Hi Nami,
Do you know if this dish freeze well with all marinated sauce and chicken and bring along to cook at camping ? Thanks
Hi Rose! Ohh camping! That sounds fun. Sure, it should work. Maybe cut back on salt or soy sauce a tiny bit when you prepping since the chicken will be marinated for a longer time. We don’t like marinating the meat too long (too salty), but if you don’t mind, maybe that’s okay. Have fun camping!