Leftover BBQ Chicken Quesadillas

Wondering what to do with your leftover pulled chicken or shredded rotisserie chicken? These BBQ chicken quesadillas combine pulled chicken with sautéed red onion, fresh parsley, and melty cheese inside crispy golden brown tortillas. They’re easy to make and can seriously elevate your leftovers.

I’ll walk you through the recipe and cover ingredient substitutes in the post below, and you’ll find a printable recipe card at the bottom of the post.

Making BBQ Chicken Quesadillas

Here’s everything you will need:

• 6″ flour tortillas
• shredded cheese (soft melting cheese like havarti or Monterey jack)
• leftover pulled BBQ chicken or rotisserie chicken mixed with BBQ sauce
• olive oil (optional)
• diced red onion (optional)
• chopped parsley (optional)

I included links to the recipes I use for the chicken in the recipe card below. If you’re using rotisserie chicken, I’d use something like 10 oz of chicken and 1/4 cup of BBQ sauce. Adjust the sauce to your liking but try not to make it too runny. You can use the skillet to thicken things after adding the chicken, however.

For the cheese, I used havarti like my BBQ chicken sliders but took the spice level up a notch with a jalapeño havarti. Other soft cheeses like Monterey jack and mozzarella or a blend of cheese will work best. But be sure you’re buying blocks of cheese and shredded yourself for best results!

As for the optional ingredients, you could certainly skip out on the veggies. In that case, you probably don’t need my help making a quesadilla!

Sauté diced red onion in olive oil for about 5 minutes until soft.

If you have the time, feel free to slow things down and go for caramelized onions. That would be great here.

Add leftover bbq chicken and chopped parsley, stirring everything together.

Like I mentioned above, if you’re using rotisserie chicken you could add the BBQ sauce to the onion and reduce/thicken before adding the chicken and parsley. You obviously just need enough time to reheat the chicken in this step. Don’t overdo it or the chicken will be tough.

This recipe also works great with something like the leftover chicken and peppers from our smoked chicken tacos recipe.

You could also use this recipe with leftover pulled pork or chopped pork tenderloin (like in our pork fried cauliflower rice). And leftover shredded chicken would work in recipes like our kolaches and pulled pork grilled cheese, in case you have lots of leftovers.

Place two flour tortillas in the skillet and top each with 1 oz of shredded cheese. Add 1/4th of the chicken mixture to one side of each tortilla.

You can see the leftover sauce in the skillet pictured above. That’s key for extra golden brown quesadillas. If you’re skimping on the veggies or reheating your BBQ chicken without the skillet, you’ll miss out on some of the color/flavor development.

A workaround might be adding a little oil to the skillet or using some juices from the leftover BBQ chicken to brush on the tortillas. That’s a big benefit of using something like the BBQ chicken thighs I used—the extra fat!

Tortilla Note: The Mission Carb Balance flour tortillas I used for our ground turkey quesadillas make a surprisingly good, lower carb quesadilla.

Fold the other half of the tortilla over to seal the quesadilla. Cook until each side is golden brown.

You can give your chicken quesadillas a little squeeze to press some juices out the sides. Like we just talked about, that will help with the browning. Move the quesadillas around to coat the sides in the good stuff.

Managing the heat of your pan is the key to make perfectly melty quesadillas. If your tortillas are browning too quickly, don’t be afraid to take the pan off the heat or turn off the heat entirely. It may take some adjustments along the way.

Side Note: Another cooking method that makes bulk prep much easier is baking in the oven. Check out my baked chicken quesadillas recipe for an example.

Serving Your BBQ Chicken Quesadillas

I kept it simple with some of Trader Joe’s Sriracha and Roasted Garlic BBQ Sauce on the side, but you could do something like this Alabama White Sauce or the mixture of honey mustard and BBQ sauce I serve with my Copycat Chick-Fil-A Grilled Nuggets. If you’ve tried my Japanese BBQ chicken and rice, you know I’m a huge fan of Bachan’s Japanese barbecue sauce, and it would work great here.

All that said, these leftover chicken quesadillas are great on their own without any dip at all.

Whatever you end up doing with your BBQ chicken quesadillas, I’d love to hear about it. Let us know in a recipe review or comment below. Enjoy!