I have been craving grilled chicken. It was a summer staple for my family growing up. We always had bone-in, skin-on, chicken breasts marinated in Italian dressing. So delicious and juicy. I don't like BBQ sauce or other sticky, sweet sauces on my chicken so the simple dressing marinade has been a favorite.
S and I haven't tried grilling chicken because we're afraid of under or over cooking it. We decided to try it, but we gave ourselves some insurance by getting bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs.
Instead of the dressing marinade I grew up with, I decided to try two other marinades: The Gourmet Cookbook's "Foolproof Grilled Chicken" and The Barefoot Contessa's Back to Basics "Tuscan Lemon Chicken".
We've been growing lots of herbs in the garden, so these recipes were perfect for pruning the rosemary, mint, and cilantro.
Gourmet's recipe called for first brining the chicken. This step requires making a brine by heating water with salt and sugar. I was only supposed to brine the chicken for 6 hours, but I let it go for a good 18 hours. This may have made the meat a little too tender. There's an Asian inspired dressing that goes over the hot grilled chicken. The dressing has lime juice, cilantro, mint, fish sauce, chile flake, and oil. I didn't have enough lime juice so I also used lemon juice, and I didn't have enough cilantro so I put in some parsley. I didn't add the salt that the recipe called for, because I thought the fish sauce was salty enough. I wish this dressing would have called for something a little sweet. Maybe some honey agave. The chicken didn't soak up the dressing flavor so much, and the brine didn't season the chicken that well in my opinion. I think it would be easier, and tastier, if the chicken were just marinated in the dressing!
Ina Garten's marinade, smelled great, and tasted great! It was pretty simple too which is a big plus. Her marinade, which is like a dressing, included lemon juice, zest, rosemary, and garlic. The chicken soaks up all the delicious flavor, especially the lemon, and is really quite delicious. In her directions, she says to cook the chicken on the cool side of the grill. This is important because the oil based marinade will catch on fire and turn your chicken into fireballs!
We followed the grilling guidelines from Gourmet's brined chicken which called for searing the chicken on the hot side of the grill first before moving it to the cool side. Luckily, S was smart enough to move the chicken in the oil based marinade to the cook side quickly so we only had a few fireballs :)
We both really liked the simpler dressing-style marinade from the Barefoot Contessa book. It reminded me of an Ann Burrell herb paste for roasted chicken. I think the ingredients are very similar. The Barefoot Contessa's chicken tasted very similar to the chicken I ate growing up. The Italian/Mediterranean flavors were very familiar to me. I may just go back to my family's standard since I think it's easier than Ina's and it tastes just as good if not better. I think with a few tweaks the Asian dressing would make a good marinade and it would be nice to add an Asian flavored grilled chicken to my repertoire.
Hopefully, one day I'll get around to trying Tandoori and Jerk chicken! Yay for summer time and for S using the grill :)
