I love buying whole, organic, free range chickens when they are on sale for $1.69/lb. I can use them in so many dishes. And brining before cooking….oh my!! Moist and tender is what you get when you brine chickens, turkey and pork. That is, depending on how you are cooking the meat.
I got an email from America’s Test Kitchen about brining meat, and, while they do have some good ideas on different techniques, I was disappointed with their peanut butter cookie edition. However, this explanation on brining is spot on.
This is the site: Cook’s Illustrated.
I haven’t tried brining the turkey or pork myself, but I have had a brined turkey and it was moist and delicious!
The poop is that soaking white meat in a mixture of salt or salt/sugar for awhile will make the meat tender and juicy. You can reference the link to Cook’s Illustrated to get the scientific lowdown, but I did a whole chicken and then grilled it.
1 whole chicken (about 3 1/2 – 4 lbs), clean the inside of parts and the outside of pins and feathers and rub the skin until smooth, rinse, pat dry and cut up one side of the backbone with kitchen scissors. This is so when you grill the chicken, you can flatten it out and the thick side cooks well.
The brining recipe:
2 quarts water
1/2 C table salt
1/2 C sugar
Swish together until dissolved in a large bowl and add chicken. Place a plate and a weight on top so that the chicken is submerged and let sit for at least 1 hour. Drain and pat dry. Take about 5 garlic cloves, halve them and stick under the chicken skin in different places (breast, thigh, leg, etc). Then baste with this:
1 tsp tamari sauce or Chay vegetarian seasoning sauce
1 tsp Keo’s sesame oil
1 tsp black vinegar
1 tsp rice wine vinegar (I use Trader Joe’s brand)
1/4 – 1/2 tsp hosin sauce
Mix and let sit for 15 minutes and baste the chicken. Grill to your liking*. Yum!**
*We usually grill a lot of stuff at once and then use it or freeze some of it. Sometimes, I grill the chicken to an underdone state, then let it sit off the grill. Cut it up and bag it and freeze. That way I can defrost and cook until warm and have the chicken still come out tender and juicy.
**Did you notice I didn’t use any salt or pepper? The brining takes care of the salt unless you are a saltaholic, and you can add pepper to your liking later when served.
1 Comment
This was one of the best tasting chickens I ever grilled, and the easiest as well. It came out nicely done with no charring of the skin. Maybe it wasn’t just the brining that did that, but then again, maybe it was.
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