How to Marinate Chicken

The prolific food scientist Harold McGee said: “Marinades are acidic liquids, originally just vinegar and now including ingredients like wine, fruit juices, buttermilk, and yogurt, in which the cook soaks the meat for hours to days before cooking. They have been used since the Renaissance, when their main function was to slow spoilage and add flavor. Today meats are primarily marinated to season and make them moister and more tender.”

Equipment

• Sealable glass jars
• Everyday skillet
• Tongs or spatula

Tests

I tested with the most challenging meat (least juicy): skinless boneless chicken breast. For each trial, I cut the breast into 2-by-2-inch pieces of roughly equal thickness. I did this to keep results consistent, but also because through my perfectly normal dabbling with marinades over the years, I’ve found flavor and tenderness effects tend to be more pronounced with a smaller cut of protein where a higher percentage of the meat has a larger surface area than, say, a whole bird (see Round 2).

In each test, I covered two pieces with enough marinade agent to cover completely (about 6 ounces for me) + Diamond Crystal kosher salt (1/2 teaspoon) + minced garlic (1 large clove). Using whole kosher salt in the solution seemed counterintuitive because it initially didn’t dissolve, but everything I read led me to believe it worked inside the marinade like a dry brine, drawing liquid from the meat and dissolving in the flavored liquid instead.

I marinated each batch — really, sorry to keep using the word “pieces” — for three and six hours, doing a cooking test after each interval. To test each piece of chicken (we are doing that), I seared the chicken in a hot Dutch oven with about a teaspoon of high-heat oil on all sides until cooked through.

Types of Marinade

• Rice vinegar (pH: 2 to 3)
• White wine (pH: 3.0 to 3.4)
• Orange juice (pH: 3.5 to 4.6)
• Buttermilk (pH: 4.4 to 4.8)
• Yogurt (pH: 4 to 4.94)
• Lemon juice (pH: approx. 3)
• Tomato sauce (pH: 5.1 to 5.8)

Results

Within three hours, the most tender marinades were lemon juice, tomato sauce, orange juice, and yogurt. Buttermilk-marinated chicken was just a bit more tender than an unmarinated piece. (Thank goodness I found a synonym for piece. It’s a piece!) Rice vinegar-marinated chicken was about half as tender as the extremely tender pieces above. Within six hours, the most tender marinades were the same: orange juice, lemon juice, tomato sauce, and yogurt, with rice vinegar joining the group. Buttermilk-marinated chicken was a bit more tender than before but still not as soft as the others.

On the flavor front, after three hours lemon juice, orange juice, tomato sauce, and wine all penetrated deeply into the meat. Only lemon juice also brought the garlic flavor into the chicken. At the six-hour mark, rice vinegar rejoined the group. Strangely, the garlic essence (also my signature scent, and all my passwords) vanished from lemon juice chicken by six hours, but garlic flavor appeared in six-hour white wine chicken. Buttermilk and yogurt flavors weren’t particularly noticeable in the three-hour tests but were subtle and delicious in six-hour tests.

Second Round

A common complaint about marinades is that even with plenty of time, penetration depth can be limited. (Say, if you’re cooking meat not cut into perfect tiny 2-by-2-inch pieces. Say, a situation like that.) The good folks at AmazingRibs.com write: “Marinades, unless heavy on salt in which case they are more properly called brines, do not penetrate meat much, rarely more than 1/8″, even after many hours of soaking. Especially in cold refrigerator where molecules are lazy. They can enter tiny pores and cracks in the surface, but that’s it.

So for each test in this round, I tested different application techniques, all with a rice vinegar marinade, to see if I could get the solution to work its magic deeper than simple surface coverage.

Application Techniques

• Simply submerged (control)
• Scored
• Injected and submerged

Results

Scoring the chicken pieces to about 1/3 inch depth significantly improved flavor absorption and sped the tenderizing effects of rice vinegar marinade at the three-hour mark, compared to simply submerged chicken. By six hours, scored chicken was gummy and over-penetrated, although I suspect a larger piece and/or bone-in breast might have appreciated the extra hours and possibly deeper scoring.

Excerpted from Food52