Bacon Wrapped Chicken

Scott requested this for Father's Day 2025, so I took some updated pictures and notes. Enjoy!

Marsha's Bacon Wrapped Chicken

Ingredients:

• 5 large chicken breasts
• 1-2 pkg thin/regular sliced bacon
• 12-16 oz cream cheese
• 2 cups shredded cheese, approx.
• Seasoning (we used Maddox, which is not available to everyone, so use your favorite seasoning combos) (in 2025, we didn't have more Maddox seasoning, so I used a garlic parmesan blend from Weber)

Directions:

1. Start out with your chicken breast on top of a layer of plastic wrap, then another piece of plastic wrap on top. Or, alternatively, place your chicken inside a plastic food storage bag.
2. Pound the chicken into an even layer with a meat tenderizer. Be careful not to get holes in your chicken.
• Thinner on the chicken is better than too thick, because then you can wrap the chicken completely around the filling to keep more of it from leaking out during the baking process. So don't be afraid to go thin, but don't go so thin that it makes holes.
3. Next, lay out some bacon on a plate. 2-4 pieces vertically, and 2 pieces horizontally, if using two packages. If using one package:
• Marsha's Note: One package of bacon is not enough to wrap five breasts this way, so just divide up your bacon into as many piles as you need for the number of breasts you are using. We still wrapped all of our chicken just fine with one package, but it was more like 3 or 4 strips TOTAL per breast. The bacon does not need to go both vertically and horizontally if you don't want it to because...
• As you wrap, any bacon that overlaps may not crisp up under the broiler, so if blubbery bacon bothers you, make sure as much of your pieces of bacon is exposed to the broiler as possible. This makes wrapping the bacon in two directions problematic because one layer gets covered and not crisp. Instead, I would wrap my chicken with bacon in one direction only and possibly seal the ends of the chicken with toothpicks to hold the cheese in (rather than sealing the ends of the chicken with wrapped bacon).
4. Lay your chicken in the center of the bacon. You can season your chicken a bit at this point if you want to, but I put enough seasoning in my cream cheese that I didn't find it necessary. 
5. Mix together some cream cheese and garlic salt, or use the herb flavored cream cheese. Spread a layer of the mixture on the chicken, then add a little bit of shredded cheddar cheese. You can also add other desired things to your filling, like other chopped up veggies.
6. Roll the chicken up a little and fold up the horizontal pieces of bacon, making sure the sides are covered. then fold up the vertical pieces and secure with a toothpick if they won't stay. Sprinkle with additional seasoning, if desired.
7. Lay the chicken seam side down on a greased pan. I just put mine onto some tinfoil on top of the pan and it worked great. You can bake as-is, or sprinkle a little bit of brown sugar on top for some sweetness.
8. Bake at 400° for about 45 minutes (ours took an hour to 75 minutes for big chicken breasts), turning it over about halfway through.
9. Then turn the oven up to 500° or broil (watch closely!!) to brown the bacon and make it crispy. *You can turn the chicken over again to make sure all the bacon is cooked.
10. If you cut open the chicken after all of this and if the chicken still isn't cooked all the way through, you can put it back in the oven (covered) for another 15 minutes or so and it will be perfect!

Marsha's Notes:

This is one of the seasoning blends I have used in this recipe:

For our family of five, I just bought a large package of five boneless skinless chicken breasts from the store and then used two full blocks of cream cheese. I just added probably a couple of tablespoons of this seasoning blend to my softened cream cheese, blended it with a hand mixer, taste-tested, and then added more if needed until I had the filling the way I liked it. I am sure I would use more or less depending on what seasoning blend I was using. 

If you don't have a blend to use, you could just eyeball some salt, pepper, onion powder and garlic powder until you got something that you liked. Maybe start with a teaspoon of each or so, and go from there. You can also just buy the kind of cream cheese that already has herbs in it.

I also really don't like blubbery bacon fat, so I used the broiler to crisp up my bacon on the top of the chicken, and then I flipped the chicken over to crisp up the bottoms as well. Even with all of that, any bacon that was "double wrapped" on the chicken and protected from the broiler still had some "not crispy" bits, so I would probably try really hard to only wrap my chicken with bacon going one direction with as little overlap as possible... at least for my piece.

I foiled-lined a baking sheet with some extra-long tin foil so it would all be in one piece to contain the fat drippings. Then I put the wrapped chicken on a wire rack placed on top of the foil-lined pan. I did spray the wrack, just to make sure the chicken didn't stick, but it seems like there is enough fat from the bacon that you probably don't need to.

Covered and stored in the fridge until I was ready to bake.

Done!