Easiest Way to Cook Chicken in a Slow Cooker

If you're looking for an easy way to cook chicken in a slow cooker, you are in the right place. This salsa chicken may seem simplistic, but it's a great way to prepare chicken for meal prep.

I go through spurts where I like to "eat clean." I completed a 30-day elimination diet a few different times and found that I feel a lot better when I don't eat gluten, dairy, or lots of added sugar. Part of the diet also includes planning out your meals so you don't go off track when you've got a busy day.

If you've done this kind of diet before, you know you can't just eat any old thing. You aim to eat food with as few ingredients as possible, or mostly whole foods. One way that I stuck to the plan was to bulk cook proteins and then add them to different meals and flavor them at the time I ate them. I always wanted to have cooked chicken available to create easy meals but boiling chicken isn't my favorite and grilling it isn't always possible.

That's when I discovered bulk prepping chicken in the slow cooker. It's such a time saver and makes meal prep a breeze.

Slow cooking is so easy because all you need is a little bit of fluid to cook your dishes. Simply add your chicken then the fluid of your choice and you're all set. At first, I just added some chicken stock and salt and pepper into the slow cooker. That is still probably the most versatile way to cook large batches of chicken to use later. Just dice or shred your chicken and then add it to the dish you're preparing for an easy meal. Think stir fry, pasta dishes, salads; you name it.

My new favorite way to cook chicken in the slow cooker is to make salsa chicken. It's as simple as it sounds. You add your raw chicken to the slow cooker, then pour in your favorite salsa. Put the lid on and cook on high for 3 hours or low for 6-8 hours. The chicken shreds beautifully and can be used on salads, in tacos, enchiladas, burritos, or anything else you can think of.

Burrito bowls have been my jam lately and I use this method probably once a week to create flavorful bowls with cilantro lime rice and my jazzed-up black beans.