#two pans

[fieriframes]

[Guy, two pans is better than one. Two pans! [Robin laughs] Alright. So, 50 minutes. Let them proof.]

[fieriframes]

[Guy, two pans is better than one. Two pans! Eglinton laughed. Alright. So, 50 minutes. Let them proof.]

[livingoffyourland]

Lesson 16: Quick Marinated Chicken (With Broccoli!)

Let it never be said that I don’t appreciate simple food simply prepared. There is a joy to be found in the humble pork chop, fresh from the grill. There is poise in pan seared fish with a splash of lemon juice. And in the juicy steak we find a kind of universality -- a dish equally at home in the humblest of diners, and served beside a bottle of wine that could finance a car.

But in my kitchen, these dishes appear only rarely. A side of fish is special occasion food, only occurring when the stars align and urge meets availability. Good steaks are too expensive to make a regular appearance on my plate, and cheap steaks are rarely worth eating. And while pork chops do appear, they’re cheat to get onto the menu[1]. No, when it comes to simple meals, simply prepared, the simple truth is that these dishes simply don’t have a place in many a cook’s home. They’re simply too expensive, simply too fussy, or simply not as simple as we think they are.

This is not to say that mine is a meat free kitchen, nothing could be further from the truth. But when faced with the tougher, leaner, or just plain blander cuts of meat that I can afford, I turn to the chef’s secret weapon: the soak.

A soak is a broad category of culinary techniques that include brining, marinating, pickling, and is a close cousin to rubbing[2]. All soaks work by immersing your chosen food in a salty or acidic solution (or both!), and allowing that solution to diffuse into your food.

A brine is the simplest of the soaks, just salt, sometimes sugar, sometimes a few spices, and water. The primary goal of a brine is to pull salt into the soaking meat, but it has the secondary advantage of pulling more water into the meat as well, leaving you with a piece of meat that will stay moist long after an untreated piece would turn to leather.

Marinades are the dressed up cousins of brines. While this can take the form of heavy spicing and lots of thickening and the most exotic ingredients you can find in your kitchen, I was always taught that the biggest difference was the inclusion of an acid, either replacing or augmenting the salt load. When my parents were learning to cook, it was common knowledge that marinades helped to ‘tenderize’ tough cuts of meat, as the acid ate away at the flesh. This is thankfully not true. No acid in your kitchen is strong enough to eat the flesh from your bones[3]. What acids do do for the eater is stimulate taste buds and saliva production. And since most marinades are also brines, the meat that is stimulating your saliva production is much moister and therefore more tender.

A pickle is just a special marinade or brine, made to preserve a food and keep it edible, longer. And they have enough complexity on their own that they will certainly be getting a lesson or three all to themselves.

Since I’ve already done a brine way, way back in Aside 1, I figured we could focus on marinades today. And recently that has meant chicken. While any meat can be marinated, chicken breast cooks fast, and is very lean, and that leanness means that any flavor backup it can get will be appreciated.  For today’s experiment you will need

1-2 pounds of chicken breast, boneless.

2 tablespoons of rice wine vinegar

2 tablespoons of hot sauce

1 tablespoon sesame oil

1 tablespoon dry mustard

5-10 cloves of garlic, smashed

Soy Sauce (reduced sodium), amount in recipe

Marinades can be constructed out of a lot of different ingredients, and I honestly think it’s more fun to experiment than follow directions. But all marinades follow a similar form. All marinades will ultimately contain:

An acid: Played here by the rice wine vinegar. Rice wine vinegar is actually a lower acidity vinegar than most commercial vinegars, and tastes only very subtly sweet. Another good alternative might be white wine vinegar, or sherry vinegar, but not white distilled vinegar (which is very rough stuff), and no balsamic either (which is very expensive and temperature sensitive)

A liquid, usually (but not always) salt laden: Usually played by salt added to water, today played by soy sauce, reduced sodium, added to cover the chicken.

Spices and aromatics: In the case of last night played by 5 cloves of garlic, peeled and smashed, two tablespoons of hot sauce, a tablespoon of sesame oil (a very aromatic oil), and a tablespoon of dried mustard (wet mustard would work fine).

You can play around with the amounts and the actual ingredients, as long as there is one representative from each category in your marinade.

Construct your marinade in a gallon zip lock bag, or a non-reactive vessel. I prefer bags because it is much easier to remove the air, but it is a bit wasteful since the bags become effectively single use. Just add all of the ingredients save for the soy sauce, and turn your attention to the chicken.

Slice the chicken into thin strips. This not only speeds cooking by reducing internal mass to cook, but it also speeds and improves the marinade by giving the marinade more surface area to contact. Trim where you want, then toss the pieces into the bag. Pour soy sauce over until you have almost (but not completely) covered the chicken. Then seal the bag most of the way, and work the air out fo the bag. I generally do this by rolling the bag up, or by taking a straw and pushing it into the bag, and sucking the remaining air out. You don’t have to get all of it, but the less air there is in the bag, the more the liquid will have contact with the meat. Place the bag inside a mixing bowl. You always want to put your soaking meats inside of a leak proof container like a tuperware or a mixing bowl, just on the off chance that the bag you have springs a leak. It’s not common, but you only have to scrub out the inside of one refrigerator to never want to do it again. Once the bag is in the bowl, toss it into your refrigerator for two to four hours. This is actually a rather salty marinade, all things considered, and you won’t want to keep it soaking for very long. If you do, then you will learn as I did exactly what a salt lick tastes like. If you plan on keeping the chicken without cooking it for longer than four hours, drain the meat and return it to a fresh bag, and refrigerate. Do not reuse the marinade. It’s already been soaking in raw meat for hours, and that can lead to bad times for you down the road.

If you’ve done it right, you’ll have red little pieces of raw chicken, loaded with flavor and probably smelling quite like sesame garlic.

But what do you do with that?

Well...if you were me, you’d start up some rice (probably about a cup), and be sure to use some extra water to get stickier rice. Then you’d steam up some broccoli, using the recipe from Lesson 7. You won’t need a whole head of broccoli, but the rest can be bagged and reused in another stir fry.

You’d then put some oil in the bottom of a broad fry pan, and heat it over medium -- medium high heat. You’d get the chicken out the fridge, and get a plate with some paper towels on it ready. You’d fry that chicken in two batches, dropping half into the pan and stirring it, making sure every slice gets contact with the bottom of the pan. You’d make sure they got nice and brown, which would take three to four minutes on each side. Then once both sides were done, you’d evacuate them to that plate with paper towels on it to drain, and finish the second half of the chicken.

Once the chicken is cooked fully and and golden brown and delicious, you’d drain most of the fat out of the pan, if there was more than a thin layer. Then you’d put it back on medium heat, and deglaze with a white wine, maybe with a tiny bit of chicken broth to go along with it. You’d add a sparing pinch of salt, maybe a bit of pepper or dill or paprika, or maybe a teaspoon of mustard. Then dust on a little cornstarch to thicken the sauce, very quickly stirring to keep any lumps from forming. Once the sauce was done, you’d put the broccoli and the chicken on top of the rice, add the pan sauce, and bring it to table.

And then, I think, you’d enjoy.

Footnotes:

[1]  Those of you who’ve read my aside on Salt will recall that I brined the pork then, putting it in a salt solution to soak. This is something I do to every pork chop that makes it’s way across my kitchen, with the exception of kassler, which makes its way to me already salted and smoked. The reason for this is that mass market pigs are lean creatures, compared to their ancestors, and their meat dries out and gets tough without intermuscular fat to keep everything slippery. Those of you who performed the salt experiment may have noticed that in addition to being rather bland, the unsalted pork chop turned into leather much easier than its brined cousin, which stayed moist far longer.

[2] Even though rubs are applied dry or mostly dry to the food in question, they are still a precooking method to load the food with flavor. They simply use the liquid already in the food to dissolve and distribute the flavors, rather than bringing their own.

[3] Besides, if you want to see real tissue damage, you want to turn to basic solutions, like lye -- which is used in the production of soap, bagels, and olives. Though by the time they make it to your house the lye has been washed away, so don’t freak out.