Five-Ingredient Dinners

About Five-Ingredient Dinners

Test cooks share their favorite low-effort, high-reward complete weeknight dinners, most ready in an hour or less.

Imagine surveying your pantry or fridge and realizing you already have every ingredient you need to make any number of fast, flavor-packed meals. Sounds like a dream? These back-pocket dinners make it a reality, with recipes that transform foods such as a rotisserie chicken, a baguette, hummus, or quinoa into full meals using just five ingredients (plus salt, pepper, and fat) that require little in the way of planning.

What these recipes lack in ingredients, they more than make up for in flavor and creativity. We use simple techniques to our advantage to coax the maximum amount of oomph out of each component: