The correct way to cook chicken breast

Preheat your oven to 400°F with your cast iron skillet inside. Once the oven is fully preheated, remove the skillet to the cooktop over medium-high heat while you prep the chicken breasts. Sprinkle the breasts liberally with a 3:2 mixture of kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. (You should grind the pepper just before you need it so that you don't have to touch your pepper grinder with a hand that recently touched raw meat. Sanitation!)

By this point your skillet is probably so hot, smoke's coming off it. Pour in a generous amount of canola oil (or corn, peanut, safflower, anything with a high smoke point), say 3Tbsp. Add the chicken to the pan cook for four minutes on this side, and kinda push 'em around with your tongs a bit during the first thirty seconds so they don't stick. After four minutes, flip the breasts and cook another four minutes, again moving the meat so it doesn't stick. (If your skillet has a better season on it than mine does, that bit may not be necessary.) Once four minutes has passed, move the whole pan into the 400° oven and leave it for approximately ten minutes.

After ten minutes, retrieve your chicken from the oven and use a thermometer to check the temperature of one of the pieces. You're looking for between 155° and 160°.

How to serve a perfectly-cooked chicken breast: I sliced mine in nice thick slices, on a bias, and I fanned them out on a plate around a little pile of stir-fry veggies I found in the freezer. (If you want to be less of a slob, replace the stir-fry veggies with a little salad.) And I used the oil I cooked the chicken in to make a vinaigrette with dijon mustard and drizzled that over the chicken.