This easy kumquat chicken skillet is a simple and quick dinner that is full of gorgeous colors. Just six simple ingredients and dinner is served!
This recipe is brought to you in collaboration with Bertolli. We are grateful for our partners! Their support that enables us to bring you beautiful free content every week!
Everyone loves a good skillet dinner am I right? There is nothing quite as simple as tossing a few things together in a pan, browning them quickly and then popping them into the oven to finish. This easy kumquat chicken skillet uses just 6 simple ingredients to make dinner a cinch. Bertolli olive oil, chicken, purple potatoes, kumquats, honey, and basil!
We love using Bertolli organic extra virgin olive oil to start our meals with! I love that it is completely non-GMO, made from organic olives and produced using organic farming standards. Bertolli is the leading olive oil brand globally and have over 150 years of experience in blending olive oils. So it’s an easy choice for me to know that no one is getting pesticides and other junk in our food and we are getting a great well balanced product!
The intense, full-bodied flavor of the extra virgin olive oil is my preferred base for everything from sautéing or grilling vegetables, seasoning meats, and drizzling into pastas and marinades. One of my favorite things to do is to brush a few pieces of great artisan bread with a bit of olive oil and rub them down with a smashed garlic clove. Pop them on the grill or under your broiler for the perfect addition to this easy dinner!
Let’s get cooking!
To start off, heat an oven safe skillet (we love a good enameled cast iron skillet) until it is nice and hot. A quick toss of the chicken and potatoes in olive oil and salt and pepper and then everything goes into the pan to get a nice sear. Give it a few minutes to develop some nice color on each side and then pop it in the oven to finish up. While that wraps up let’s work on this sauce!
The sauce comes together so simply and is such a beautiful pop of color on the dish. Remove any stems and leaves from your kumquats and slice them in half. Add 1 cup of water to help get the boil going and let the kumquats break down for around 25 minutes. Taste the sauce and add honey if needed to desired sweetness. Kumquats range in their flavors (like most fruits) throughout the season, and can get particularly puckery at the end of the season. But at the start of the season (or if you just love tart things like our family) you may not need any honey at all as they are so sweet. So definitely take the time to let them break down and taste the sauce before sweetening further.
This kind of quick marmalade if you will….is one of my favorite things to do with kumquats. The seeds and rinds provide an abundance of natural pectin so they begin to gel all on their own without the addition of any commercial pectin or cornstarch. It’s just one way of nature making it easy on us.
If the seeds drive you bonkers you can go through the effort of separating the rind from the fruit before cooking. Place the fruit and seeds in tied cheesecloth and squeeze out as much juice as you can. Then slice the rinds into thin strips before boiling everything together. Once the sauce is done simply give the cheesecloth one more squeeze and remove it entirely.
I take the time to do this process if I’m going to be making it for a more delicate serving purpose (like as jam or over ice cream etc), but it’s an awful fussy business just for a weekday dinner. So for us so we just eat around the seeds and enjoy the quick and easy puckery sweet sauce that they create.
Spoon the sauce over the chicken once it is fully cooked and the potatoes and roasted tender and top with basil! So simple and so elegant.
If you happen to have sauce leftovers (or feel inclined to make a big double batch) it’s heavenly spooned onto brie, spread on your afternoon toast for tea, or eaten straight out of the jar with a spoon.
Not that I’ve ever done that latter one 😉
I hope you make this dish for your family the next time you find kumquats! And be sure to grab a bottle of Bertolli’s olive oil at your local Fred Meyer or check out Villabertolli.com to find it at more locations near you!
Kumquat Chicken Skillet Recipe
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons Bertolli organic extra virgin olive oil
- 5 chicken breasts or chicken thighs
- 1 lb mini purple potatoes cleaned and halved
- 1 lb kumquats cut in half
- 1 cup water
- honey to taste
- handful of fresh basil leaves
Instructions
- 1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.2. Toss chicken and potatoes with olive oil and salt and pepper.3. Sear in hot oven safe pan (I love cast iron) until nice color develops on chicken.4. Move to oven and cook until chicken juices run clear. Potatoes may not be fully finished cooking when chicken is, if that is the case remove chicken to a covered plate and allow potatoes to finish cooking through.5. Make quick marmalade:6. Add kumquats and water to saucepan. Bring to a boil. 7. Reduce heat to medium and simmer for 20-30 minutes, until jam consistency is reached.8. Thin with water if needed. Sweeten to taste with honey if desired.9. Serve in pan with kumquat sauce over chicken. Pairs lovely with garlic bread, salad and a nice bottle of wine. Enjoy!
Nutrition
This recipe is brought to you in collaboration with Bertolli. We are grateful for our partners. Their support that enables us to bring you beautiful free content every week!
This recipe was great. We followed the directions. Cut the cooked chicken in pieces on our plates and used the kumquat sauce over the chicken. Forked the kumquat through into the piece of chicken. It was excellent.
This is so unique! I’ve never used kumquats!
Yummy!
What a gorgeous meal!