Flavorful, Tender & Juicy Chicken

When it comes to cooking chicken, making it flavorful is one thing, but keeping it juicy, can be another challenge altogether. To “glaze” over the shortcomings of this technique, some cooks will modify recipes by using extra toppings, or sauces to cover over their mistake, almost as if drying out the chicken were a calculated risk. Cooking juicy chicken doesn’t have to be overly complicated though. And we’re going to discuss just a few tips to help give you an edge on how to cook this culinary favorite.

For starters, ensuring great flavors for your chicken can be as simple as making good use of the proper salts, herbs, oils and seasonings. And the combinations of such flavors can be as endless as your imagination. In terms of seasonings though, on general principle, the fresh ones tend to work best because of the intensity of the acids and oils within the fibers of the various spices. Fresh seasoning combinations also work fairly quickly when penetrating the proteins of the chicken. This ensures that the flavors become well developed once the meat is exposed to the heat.

Another great way for flavoring chicken is to marinate it. The marinating process infuses flavors into the proteins over a longer span of time. This results in adding a more depth of flavor into the fibers of the protein instead of just on the surface.

But the real secret to keeping chicken juicy, falls within the finesse of understanding the cooking temperatures and managing the carry over process. Here is where a lot of cooks get into trouble, and this trouble often comes from overlooking the impact of the carry over cooking process. The carryover coking process, creates a space that allow for meats to rest and arrive at the desired doneness instead of cooking them into jerky to get them there. In other worlds, while direct heat cooks and pushes the natural juices out of the meat, the carry over cooking process allows the natural juices to settle back into the the fibers of the meat, therefore maintaining its moisture and keeping it juicy.

The real secret to having juicy chicken falls within negotiating the heat during the cooking process

Try to think of it this way; if you wanted to cook a steak to an internal temp of medium well, you would remove it from the heat once the internal temp reaches medium. But because chicken doesn’t have the varying levels of doneness, the process has to be adjusted for the carry over cooking to have the desired affect. So how is this done??

Well, one ancient culinary secret is, to finish the chicken using a lower cooking temperature, which in affect starts the resting process, without completely removing from he heat as you would a steak. So if you’re grilling the chicken, instead of continuing to cook it using the high heat, you could finish it by moving it to a cooler spot on the grill, allowing the juices to settle and the moisture to be retained.

Alternatively if you’re cooking the chicken in an oven, you could begin by searing it, to seal in the juices, and then finishing it in the oven using less intense heat. As long as your internal temp is outside of the unsafe bacterial zone of 165/F, your chicken should remain succulent, full of flavor, and ready to be used with any combination of sauces, toppings, salads, etc.. And that’s how its done! No need to over sauce it to compensate for any calculated mistakes. Just make sure to understand the flavoring process and how to negotiate your heat accordingly and you’re good to go!

So now that you know the secret to making epic chicken, what combinations will you use to put your culinary signature on this famed favorite? Why not give it a try and see what you come up with, and when you do, drop us an line and let us know how it turned out!