Hot Honey Ground Chicken Burger Bowls

A lot like Hansel, burger bowls are so hot right now. But they’re mostly all the same spin on ground beef with standard burger toppings and condiments. These ground chicken burger bowls, on the other hand, aim to spice things up with homemade hot honey sauce, ranch roasted potatoes, and a pickle slaw that’s bright and tangy.

I like to serve this trio alongside fixin’s like leaf or shredded lettuce, crumbled feta, and Greek yogurt ranch for surprisingly high protein burger bowls.

Ingredients and Substitutes

You have four groups of ingredients:

• Hot Honey Ground Chicken – ground chicken breast, honey, vinegar, chili oil, salt, pepper, paprika, garlic powder
• Roasted Potatoes – baby gold potatoes, olive oil, ranch seasoning
• Pickle Slaw – dill pickles, pepperoncini, pickled jalapeño peppers, white onion, olive oil
• Fixin’s – lettuce, feta or your choice of cheese, ranch or another dressing/sauce

There are plenty of potential shortcuts and substitutes. I’ve included some examples below.

Roasted Potatoes

You can find tons of frozen roasted potatoes or even baked fries in most grocery stores these days, in case you didn’t want to take the time to make the ranch roasted potatoes.

If you’re looking to save some calories but still want a potato component, check out my low calorie potato substitutes guide. It has nine alternatives with fewer carbs and calories that can be roasted just like the potatoes here. Don’t sleep on air fried keto potatoes (aka roasted radishes).

You can also skip the roasting step and go with pan fried radishes or potatoes like in my bacon cheeseburger skillet.

Ground Chicken and Hot Honey Sauce

If you don’t keep chili oil or chili crisp on hand (that should change), you can just use hot honey mixed with a bit of olive oil and the other seasonings. Add some chile flakes for heat and boom, you have a solid sauce.

With simple recipes like this, I always like to emphasize the importance of properly browning the proteins. The recipe calls for adding the ground chicken to a hot pan and leaving it untouched for 3-4 minutes before breaking apart and fully cooking. If you don’t see a golden brown crust like in the photo below, give it longer.

A pro tip for browning meat is to break it into smaller pieces. This allows steam to escape, creating a hot and dry environment perfect for browning.

As a final protein note, ground turkey will work fine as a substitute for chicken here in case you have trouble finding ground chicken in your grocery store. If that is the case, and you’re looking to try ground chicken, it’s super easy to make your own.

Pickle Slaw

I first made this slaw for my smoked chicken sandwiches after seeing Matty Matheson’s New Year’s Eve recipes. It’s really the perfect way to zhoosh up pickles and pickled peppers. The tangy, briny flavors work perfectly with the ground chicken and potatoes, and the slaw adds a lot of volume to the burger bowls without adding many calories.

You can customize the slaw with any type of pickled peppers or other veggies, but I would definitely recommend using something that has visible herbs and pickling ingredients in the jar. That way you can just add them straight to the slaw without needing to chop up fresh herbs. Though that’s a good move anyway if you’re an herb lover.

Building Healthy Burger Bowls

Pictured in this recipe, you’ll see crumbled reduced fat feta cheese and Greek yogurt ranch that I borrowed from my buffalo chicken and cauliflower bowls. The ranch is made with 1 cup of nonfat Greek yogurt, 1 tablespoon of vinegar, 1 tablespoon of ranch seasoning, and 1/4 cup to 1/3 cup of milk to your desired consistency.

My high protein fried chicken tacos use Toby’s yogurt ranch and pickle de gallo that would both work great here as swaps for homemade low calorie ranch and pickle slaw.

It’s a simple burger bowl sauce option, but you can get creative and add things to blended Greek yogurt or cottage cheese, especially for other flavor profiles. See my jalapeño ranch yogurt sauce or cottage cheese dip for examples.

I recommend serving either over a bed of shredded lettuce or with leaf lettuce to make something like chicken burger lettuce wraps. If you’re leaning the lettuce wrap direction, you might want to dice the potatoes instead of quartering. That way they’re a bit easier to eat and assemble.

Okay, that’s a lot of talk about a burger in a bowl recipe. If you have questions about anything I forgot to cover, drop them in the comments below. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy the recipe and always appreciate recipe reviews if you do!