Text 14676, 100 rader
Skriven 2011-08-14 17:05:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
Ärende: Tandoori 2
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     Title: The Food Lab: Tandoori Chicken Pt 2
Categories: Indian, Chicken, Grill, info
  Servings: 4

           Tandoori Chicken

Marinade

Back when I was in college, I was still of the mindset that in order
to work, a marinade needs to, well, marinate, which meant time. I
still know many people, well respected cooks even!, who think that as
far as marinades go, longer is better. This is emphatically not the
case, and is one of the greatest marinade myths. There are a few
ways in which marinades do act.

Fats and liquids transfer flavor. Aromatic compounds from spices,
herbs, and whatever else you stick in the marinade will dissolve in
fat (if your marinade has oil in it, for example), while other
compounds will dissolve in water or in alcohol. This can help to
distribute that flavor evenly around a piece of meat or vegetables.
Note: this is essentially a surface treatment. Oils and fats will
not penetrate into the meat at all. Salt will loosen muscle fibers.
I always put a good healthy dose of salt into my marinades, as its
one of the few ingredients that can actually penetrate the meat
beyond the very outermost layers. Muscle fibers actually dissolve
and loosen up in the presence of a salty liquid, allowing them to
retain more moisture during cooking (see more on the science of
brining here Acid will "cook" meat. And herein lies the problem with
most marinades, particularly those containing acidic ingredients
such as wine, vinegar, or citrus juice. Acid can denature muscle
protein in very much the same way that heat can (see more on the
science of acids and meat in my article about ceviche here). Given
enough time in an acidic marinade, your meat will dry out, turning
stringy and chalky just as if you had overcooked it. It's this last
factor that I believe seriously destroys most bad restaurant
tandoori chicken: chicken that's been allowed to sit in its marinade
for too long so that it's already "cooked" before it even hits the
oven.

Here's another fact about marinades: they don't really penetrate
very deeply into the meat. Try marinating a piece of chicken or beef
in a marinade with an intensely colored dye (such as a tandoori
chicken marinade), and you'll find that even after 24 hours, it'll
barely have penetrated beyond a few millimeters.

I've found that any more than 6 to 8 hours of marinating in an
acidic marinade and your chicken or beef will become hopelessly
mushy and chalky in the exterior. I prefer the texture of a
five-hour marinade.

Surface Area

So if a marinade is really essentially a surface treatment for meat,
what's the best way to increase its effect on flavor?

How about we just increase the surface area of the chicken? By
slashing it with a sharp knife at regular intervals along its
surface (make sure to slash against the grain), you greatly increase
the area in which the marinade can flavor it.

With my chicken done marinated, it came time to cook it. Now, if
there's one thing I know about chicken, it's that I don't like it
when it's overcooked, and the FDA's recommended 165 F internal
temperature for chicken breast is well beyond the pale of what's
acceptable to my palate. I much prefer my chicken cooked to a more
reasonable (and still reasonably safe) 145 F. A temperature at which
it still retains plenty of juiciness.

You hear a lot of fuss in recipes about how chicken legs need to be
cooked a good 20 F higher than chicken breast, and how much of a
problem this causes. The first part is true. Because leg meat
contains more connective tissue, you do want to cook legs hotter, to
at least 165 to 170 F or so, if not more. It's the latter part that
completely ceases to be a problem once you start cooking your
chickens butterflied.

Because the legs and thighs are thinner than the breasts, I find
that they naturally end up about 20 F hotter than the breast when
the whole thing is finished cooking, even without flipping,
chilling, separating, or any of the other fussy techniques that have
been developed over the years to deal with the problem.

:Posted by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

  From: Serious Eats                    
 
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Cheers

YK Jim


... Boiled chicken has absolutely no charm.

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