One Pot Crack Chicken Pasta

Crack chicken is so good but this one pot crack chicken casserole is about to blow your mind. Now crack chicken has totally gone viral and you usually serve that on rice or a bun or something like that but this is the full meal in a one pot dish that you cannot pass up. Just like crack chicken it's loaded with chicken, cheese, bacon, ranch but then you add in that pasta and you've got a full meal. To start off I'm going to take three chicken breasts. Now I want them to cook quick and fast and so what I need to do is to pound them out a little bit so they're very even. To do that you're going to take a chicken breast, wrap it up in plastic wrap and then you're just going to simply take your anger out on it. You could just pound the chicken flat without the plastic wrap but wrapping it in that plastic wrap is going to ensure those chicken germs aren't flying all over the place. Once the chicken breasts are pounded flat we're going to head over to the stove. In a large pot that is oven safe I'm going to add in about two tablespoons of cooking oil. Use olive oil, use vegetable oil, whatever you prefer. I'm going to heat that up over medium-high heat. I really love this cast iron enamel dish. It's perfect for popping in the oven. I love to saute on the stove top with it. These are fantastic pots. Our oil is heated up so we're going to add in the chicken and we're going to cook this for about five minutes per side. What we're looking for is for browning because what is browning? It is flavor profiles and we want that in our dish. Our chicken is done cooking. It's reached a safe internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit so we're going to remove that and just simply set it on a plate to the side. Into the same pot that we just cooked our chicken in we're going to add in four cups of water and two cups of chicken broth and we're going to bring that to a boil. The reason I love this one pot so much is because all the flavor of that chicken that was cooked in there is going to be infused in our pasta and the rest of this dish. Now that our liquid's boiling we're going to dump in 12 ounces of penne pasta. Give that a stir. One pot dishes get a bad rap because the pasta usually gets soggy but not this dish. Watch it closely. 10 minutes is the perfect amount of time. You also don't need to cover this. We want a little bit of evaporation as we're cooking that pasta. While our pasta is cooking we're going to shred up those chicken breasts that are browned so perfectly. If you want to skip this step entirely and use like rotisserie chicken you can do that too and if you do use pre-cooked chicken it makes this dish even faster. The pasta is perfectly al dente so I'm going to turn off the heat and then I'm going to add in two tablespoons of ranch powder mix. Now we have a homemade recipe on our website or you can buy the store-bought stuff which works just great. Then we need our creamy element which is going to be our cream cheese. We're going to be using eight ounces of cream cheese and a great way for this to disperse easier and faster is to cube it up into little pieces or if it's room temperature you can just scoop that into little pieces spread it through the pan. Stir that cream cheese into that saucy pasta until it is fully melted and you're going to see that broth turns into a creamy delicious sauce. What I really love about cooking noodles in a chicken broth is you're influencing those noodles from the second they're in the liquid. Instead of just boiling your noodles in water that's boring, give it some flavor. Now we're going to add back in those three shredded up chicken breasts and you want to stir that to make sure that chicken is coated with that sauce and it's snuggled down into there with the pasta. You can see as this has been turned off the heat that sauce is just thickening up beautifully. That's because of the cream cheese and the starches that are released from the pasta. Now that our chicken and our pasta is mixed all together the next step is going to be the bacon because cracked chicken you got to have bacon. So we're going to take about a cup of crumbled bacon and sprinkle it across the top and then on top of that bacon layer we're going to add in two cups of shredded cheddar cheese. I'm going for medium cheddar cheese because it's not too sharp and it's not going to overpower those flavors but it gives it enough flavor. Now we're going to pop this in the preheated oven of 375 degrees fahrenheit and let this cook for about 15 to 20 minutes. We want that cheese to get browned and bubbly. This dish is awesome. You just saw it come together so fast and it was just easy cleanup. One pot which I just love. So give it a go. Make sure you tell us how you love it and make sure you check out our website where we've got hundreds of other restaurant quality recipes that you can easily make at home. We'll see you soon.