So THAT's How Restaurants Make Chicken Taste So Much Better
We’ve written before at HuffPost UK about how restaurants make everything from burgers to salad taste so much better than I, at least, can make at home.
But what about chicken ― specifically, the notoriously flavourless chicken breast?
Poultry sales rose and rose in the UK last year, per The Grocer. So it’s a good thing YouTuber and former chef for a Michelin-starred kitchen @SenpaiKai9000, as well as the netizens of Reddit’s r/CookingForBeginners, have tonnes of tips on how to get the cut as tender and juicy as the restaurants do.
Let’s talk about brine, baby
“One thing you absolutely have to do is brine or marinate your chicken breasts,” @SenpaiKai9000 began his YouTube Short. Redditors agree; “I almost always brine my chicken. It helps a lot!” a commenter wrote.
To make the brine, mix about one to three tablespoons of salt per litre of water depending on how salty you like it, Le Cordon Bleu says.
And if you’re making a marinade, honey, lemon, yoghurt, lime, soy sauce, olive oil, and herbs and spices (not all together!) are some of the many options you can mix together and surround the cut with.
“A few hours [of sitting in brine or marinade] is good, but you can also leave it overnight,” the chef shared.
“You also want to add some herbs like rosemary for flavour and an acid of some sort like lemon juice ― acid helps to tenderise meats, which is why marinades with vinegar work so well.”
What about actually cooking it?
The YouTuber explained that chicken breast offers its tenderest results when cooked at 60°C for an hour, which is easiest to achieve via sous vide ― which involves vacuum-sealing the meat and cooking it in a controlled water bath.
But if, like most of us, you don’t have that setup, “the second best option is to cook it in a low-temp oven.” He then seared his chicken breast on the hop, flipping it six to eight times “like a steak” before popping it in the oven at 122°C.
Redditors advise you to “let it sit for a few [after cooking] (both to kill off all bacteria and to let juices properly reabsorb) and you’ll get juicy chicken breast. I did this even with shredded chicken and it remained juicy so it works any way you slice it — literally.”
So there we have it; either brining or marinading your chicken breast, cooking it a lower temp for longer, and letting it rest after it’s done can all make the cut as juicy, tender, and delicious as your favourite restaurants do.
Or, as @SenpaiKai9000 points out at the end of his video, you can “just use chicken thighs and ignore all this bro science” instead.
