The Recipe with Kenji and Deb - Grilled Chicken

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

Grilling season is here and so are Kenji and Deb to talk grilled chicken. From marinades to brines, to the one thing that can prevent dried-out grilled chicken: a meat thermometer. No easy access to a grill? We talk grill pans, using vinaigrette for grilled chicken, and a condiment base for your marinades that Deb now swears by.Recipes mentioned: Kenji's Mayo-Marinated Chicken With Chimichurri(from NYT Cooking) Deb’s Piri Piri Chicken (from Smitten Kitchen)

I should start with a confession. Okay, your confession is? I know that today is the grilled chicken episode. And I had one job and that was to grill chicken outside and I failed. Kenji, I couldn't do it. There were heavy rains. The winds were up to 60 miles per hour. There were flood warnings and lightning, locusts, darkness, pestilence.

I grilled inside. I have a lodge pan with the grill grid. I griddled inside. I basically smoked and greased up my kitchen to fake it. From PRX's Radiotopia, welcome to The Recipe with Kenji and Deb. Where we help you discover your own perfect recipes. Kenji is the author of Food Lab and The Walk and a columnist for the New York Times. And Deb is the creator of Smitten Kitchen, and she's also the author of three really good best-selling cookbooks.

We're both professional home cooks, which means we can and will make the same dish 57 times in our quest for the perfect recipe. And on this show, we want to pull back the curtain on the recipe development process to show you a little bit about what goes into developing a perfect recipe so that you can figure out what works best for you. This is the season to crank up our backyard grills and gently set our food on fire. Downright patriotic. When we come back, we're going to talk about grilled chicken and how to make it good every time.

That's coming up on The Recipe with Kenji and Deb. Stay with us. So today's episode of The Recipe is about grilled chicken and we both grilled each other's chicken. Well, I grilled your chicken and you grill pan my chicken. But at some point today, we need to talk about grill pans and what they are, what their relationship to actual grilling is, or what their lack of relationship to actual grilling is.

Should we do that now or should we do that later? No, we're going to get into that later. Kenji? Yeah. I think we should get the bad out of the way. Why is grilled chicken often not great? Okay, so I think a lot of it comes down to it being overcooked.

People have trouble cooking chicken while even in indoor situations where they have a little bit more control. And when you're out in the grill, you don't have quite as fine temperature control in general as you do indoors. And that just makes the problem even worse. I think generally when you're outdoors, people are also more casual about cooking and eating.

And so timing is more difficult. And so I think we're all just used to having chicken that's been dried out on the grill. I don't know. I think that's when chicken is at its worst. I mean, the fear of salmonella poisoning, poisoning your friends and family and everybody going home, having had the worst time at your party is real and fair and valid. Yeah, yeah. Having it too raw is also, also scary.

Yeah. But yeah, I do, I agree with you that there are things, especially with chicken, especially with the white meat part of the chicken, you're almost like the odds are stacked against success. Like let's take something that already leans dry and cook it for what is usually way too long and make it more dry. With a pretty violent cooking method. Yeah, exactly.

An open flame and we're like kind of distracted because we're also grilling like burgers and hot dogs and like maybe supervising kids at the same time. Like, don't hit your brother in the pool. A lot of this could be resolved though, if people were to get a meat thermometer. If science were to invent a spherical chicken, you know, the chicken that was regularly shaped,

or like a chicken that was just like the shape of a brick, you know, something, because part of the problem is that, like your chicken, you know, part of the breast is really thinking part of it is thin, and you have like these weird legs that need to be cooked at a different temperature than the breast. Chickens are just kind of uneven creatures to begin with,

you know, that need to be cooked unevenly. It scares me though, cause somebody's probably working on it like perfectly spherical chicken. And it's a terrifying thought. Chickens have been becoming more and more spherical. And large. And larger. Quite large.

I think if we saw one, we talked about this with Thanksgiving, like if we saw one bounding down the street, we would run. Sorry. But you know, you could get a meat thermometer for like 10 bucks. Yes. And you would truly never overcook your meat as long as you were watching the temperature. A meat thermometer is I think by far the best investment you can make if you want to cook chicken better. And this is true whether you want to pan roast chicken parts, whether you want to roast a whole chicken,

whether you're going to grill a spatchcock chicken, whether you're going to be grilling chicken parts. Having a meat thermometer and knowing how to use it, I think are the most important thing when it comes to chicken. There's also something with the temperature. The USDA says poultry should reach a safe minimum internal temperature of 165.

But most restaurant cooks in places where they grill are going to take it off at 155 or 160 and know that the carryover here is going to lower. Okay, that's risky. I would say I've done 155 to 160. The temperature is going to continue to rise after you take it off the grill, which means that you can safely take it off a little lower without risking it overcooking or undercooking. So the temperature will continue to rise. It's difficult to predict how much temperature is going to rise because that depends on a lot of factors

such as the geometry of the food. It depends on like how hot you were grilling it. So if you're grilling it really hot, the temperature will actually rise more at the end than if you're grilling it at a more gentle pace. So it's hard to predict what the temperature rise is going to be. But the other factor when it comes to food safety is that,

you know, when you're talking about pasteurization, you know, the killing of harmful bacteria, harmful pathogens, it's not simply a matter of temperature. So it's simplified to say, OK, you just have to get your food to 165 and then it's going to be pasteurized, right? It's going to be safe. The government standards for pasteurization are a seven log reduction in bacteria. So that's like, it means that one out of,

once you pasteurize something, only one out of every 10 million starting bacteria can be remaining. And that's what's considered to be safely pasteurized. So at 165 degrees, that takes less than two seconds. It's like almost instantaneous that that happens. However, at lower temperatures, like at 150 degrees, it takes six minutes, something like that.

If you go on Serious Eats, actually, if you look for, I don't know, poultry chicken safety charts on Serious Eats, just Google that. You'll find a chart which has all the temperatures and times. But what it does mean is that even at like 145 degrees, you are actively destroying bacteria and you can actually pasteurize chicken safely at that temperature. The texture of chicken at 145 degrees is sometimes a little bit kind of softer than what people expect.

But certainly- Is it medium rare? It can be a little bit medium rare-ish, yeah. But certainly at 150, if you pull off your grilled chicken when the breast meat reaches 150 degrees, by the time you let it rest, it will have either risen in temperature to the point where it's instantly safe, you know, to 165 degrees, or, you know, if you let it rest, say, 5 to 10 minutes, it will have at least spent enough time in that safety zone, in that hot temperature zone,

to reach the same level of pasteurization that would be considered safe by, you know, by the government charts. So the bad is that chicken, especially white meat chicken, and especially skinless chicken, is incredibly prone to drying out. I think the good of grilled chicken is that I think the skin on, especially when it's marinated or brushed with the sauce, is actually pretty forgiving on the grill.

I think that the skin, it helps trap in the moisture, it can even get really crisp, it adds some fat to it, which always helps the texture of the meat. So I actually feel like in a way, in the same way that when I'm cooking your oven wings or other oven wings, I'm cooking them at a really high temperature for a long time. And because there's so much skin and fat in there, it never really tastes overcooked. And I feel like that can happen a bit with skin on parts in the grill. So even though it's very easy to overcook some parts of it,

I think that you actually have a lot more of a buffer when you use skin on whole or chicken parts than you do otherwise. Yeah, I think the skin helps in a couple of ways, right? Like the skin, if you just think of it, it's biological function, it is an insulator, right? Like it's there to help moderate the temperature of stuff inside. So like it naturally does that, right?

So when you're grilling skin on chicken on the grill, the skin is going to be sort of helping protect the meat underneath and helping it cook a little more gently. I think it also helps in another way, which is that, you know, I've even this past week when I was grilling chicken, I kind of walked away and was doing something else and, and the chicken just started like burning, like the fat started dripping down and you know, one of the pieces of chicken got completely burnt, right? But when you've got the skin on, you can just peel the skin off, you just scrape it off and the stuff underneath is fine. So like it gives your chicken kind of like a

second life, you know? I love the char though. I've always loved the flavor of charred, pretty much anything from the grill. I like using glazes and marinades and stuff with just a tiny bit of sugar in that. And we should talk, we'll talk about that, you know, like that gets it a little bit more brown, even if you're not cooking it as long,

because I liked a little taste of that. I also, I love it. I mean, to me, that's why grilled vegetables are so much more exciting than roasted vegetables. So speaking of which, I made it. I mean, to me, that's why girls' vegetables are so much more exciting than roasted vegetables. So speaking of which, I made your recipe this week, your purie purie chicken recipe, which you brought back from a trip to Portugal in like 2016 or something like that, a long time ago.

Good memory. But you didn't quite bring it back, but you had the dish there a bunch of times and then you came home and developed a recipe based on a bunch of other recipes. But in this recipe, essentially you're taking a whole chicken and you're spatchcocking it which is like I feel like almost my signature move is spatchcocking a chicken. And then you're making a marinade.

Traditionally the marinade is made with peri-peri peppers which are these North African peppers but in your recipe you call for half of a bell pepper along with any kind of hot red pepper that you can get. So I ended up using a red Fresno chili. So definitely nothing like a peri-peri pepper. I have a very clear disclaimer about the authenticity of it. But after looking at a million peri-peri marinades, I'm like, I'm just going to riff on this with

the way I think it should taste and go from there. So you're basically putting this stuff in a blender. You're putting half a bell pepper, you're putting a hot pepper, you're putting some olive oil, some red wine vinegar, some dried oregano, a bunch of herbs. So like you call for either parsley or cilantro. I used parsley, garlic, a garlic clove, half a shallot, and then you're kind of blending it all into almost like a semi emulsified vinaigrette, right? That you use both as a marinade and as a sauce.

I noticed that in one of your recipes too. Your five minute grilled chicken cutlets with rosemary, garlic and lemon on serious eats. You also do a technique like that, which you call the double duty dressing. Yes. Where it becomes the final dressing and also the marinade.

So I think you're a fan of this technique too. Oh, I love it. I mean, I was going to say, I think, you know, the idea of using, you know, because we think of vinaigrettes often as a dressing for salads, you know, or for cold dishes, but I think dressing hot grilled meats with the vinaigrette is just like a good move in general, like both because vinaigrettes work both as marinades and as sauces at the end. So instead of thinking about, yeah, like constructing a real sauce,

you know, making just a quick vinaigrette, yeah, like constructing a real sauce, you know, making, making just a quick medigrette, something that you can just toss together in a bowl, I think really works well for, for grilled meat. The only thing you have to be careful about is that, you know, some, some vinaigrettes are going to be particularly acidic and you don't want to marinate too long in an acidic marinade. So like, you don't want to go. I remember once when I was in college, I was living in a, in a house, a

fraternity house and, and someone posted like on living in a house, a fraternity house, and someone posted on the message board, the email board, hey, I have these chicken breasts that I have marinating in Italian dressing for the past week, so they should be super juicy. If anyone wants to take them and cook them. So I was like, sure, I'll take them. And I cooked them and they were just super dry and stringy and chalky. And it's because obviously the vinaigrette is like very acidic and it cooked, you know, like a ceviche to cook the chicken.

Wait a second. You went to MIT, right? Uh-huh. Man, you're just, I'm just imagining that everybody there should already know this cause they're so smart. But you know, it's, we all have to do trial and error in the kitchen.

But can you talk about that? Because I remember we've talked about this, I feel like we've talked about brining in the past too. And I feel that usually when you talk about a dry brine or a wet brine or a marinade, you usually have a warning to not do it for too long. So a brine can be part of a marinade, but they're kind of two distinct processes, right? So marinating is when you soak food in a marinade. Oftentimes that marinade is going to have some kind of acidic component, especially if we're talking about a vinaigrette, it's going to have an acidic component.

And the acid is the part that you want to avoid for doing too long, because the acid is going to make proteins coagulate, so it'll make them kind of curdle and tighten up. And the longer you leave it in an acid, the tighter they get. And so you can sort of start drying your food out even before you begin cooking it. Brines, on the other hand, whether you're talking about a liquid brine, you know, where you're, which is what one of, I think you sent me another chicken recipe, which is essentially where you use a liquid brine, which I think is a great way, a great process to use when you're going to grill something.

When you soak something in a liquid brine, or you do with the dry brining process, which is where you basically just salt it and let it sit overnight in the fridge, you're kind of doing the opposite. So you're, you're dissolving some of the proteins, so you're loosening them up. And so then when you subsequently cook brine foods, the muscle proteins don't tighten as much. And so they don't squeeze out as much liquid. The problem that can happen with brining,

and as I've been finding out in my, I've been going to a teriyaki joint every single day in Seattle, I'm trying to get to all the ones in Seattle. Are you okay? I'm doing good. How are you feeling after that? I'm doing good. It's still teriyami, not teriyaki.

It's depending on how long they've been sitting in the marinade, you can tell, like some of the ones that are over-marinated have a sort of cured texture, you know, which is what happens when you brine things for too long. Like ham is essentially just, you know, pork that's been brined for a very long time, right? And so your chicken, if you brine it for too long or you dry brine it for too long,

say a couple days, it can get start to get like a sort of hammy texture to it, which is not necessarily like dry, but it's like kind of almost denser and doesn't it doesn't shred the same way that like fresh chicken shreds when you when you grill it, you know. So what's your recommendation is up to 24 hours, not much longer. Yeah. Yeah. And in an acidic marinade, like you're, you know, the marinade for your chicken, your period period chicken, you recommend a minimum, I think, of 20 minutes and up to six hours.

And I think that's right. Like any longer than six hours, it would start to get a little sort of cooked tasting, you know, get that chalky taste of. And I think you were talking about, I'm just trying to get better at saying recipe names, the exceptional grilled chicken recipe of mine. This is not the period period, the exceptional grilled chicken on smittenkitchen.com.

That's the one where I call for a wet brine. And I talk about finishing it with a sort of dressing or vinaigrette and I've got a few examples, but it's a similar technique. Well, in that we're using, it's a brining technique. And I love the idea that you come home from the grocery store, it's a similar technique. Well, in that we're using, it's a brining technique. And I love the idea that you come home from the grocery store, it's a Friday, and you just throw your chicken, whatever parts in this mixture of the salt, sugar solution, in the fridge in a Ziploc bag.

And then the next day when you want to grill, you can just throw it on the grill and then finish it with one of these sauces. And it's a really fail-proof way to grill chicken without having to think that hard about it. And the brining, the extra juiciness you get gives you better protection. It's a really fail-proof way to grill chicken without having to think that hard about it. And the brining, the extra juiciness you get gives you better protection. It does, especially because like a brine, it's most effective on the exterior of the chicken and that's the part that's most prone to drying out anyway, that's going to be sort of facing the brunt of the heat.

One of the other nice things you can do is that you can actually defrost chicken or pork chops or whatever directly in a brine as well. So if you're going to, if you're going to be grilling on a Friday night, you can take your chicken out of the freezer on a Thursday, put it in a container of brine and throw that in the fridge and it'll brine and defrost at the same time so that you'll have it ready to cook. I had no idea. And I'm definitely going to try that. I was thinking about we had some extra chicken parts. I'm like, don't want to freeze them. And I feel like I'll just forget about them in the freezer.

I never want to use them, but understanding that I could, I could do two things at once is a very important thing to know as we go into the summer grilling. Yeah, whip out the old brine bucket. So I would say that from pretty much the first day I started my website before most of you were born at this point in the dark ages, I have had a thing against boneless, skinless chicken breasts. I didn't understand why people like them.

I didn't understand why they were the most ubiquitous meat in America. I didn't understand the appeal. They were always dry. Like in, you know, salad bars have them precooked and cold and it just doesn't do anything for them. But a central thing that I love to do on my site and in my cooking is challenge myself to find ways to make things that I think I don't like in a way that I love. And for me, a little bit of a brine or a great marinade has made a huge difference for me where I will eat it willingly.

I also ate chicken breast willingly for dinner last night, and my husband had some leftover for lunch today in a sandwich. I made your mayo marinated chicken with chimichurri from the New York Times. Yeah. And it was great. And I loved that you started with the same disclaimer that I always have with mayo. If the idea of rubbing chicken cutlets with mayo before grilling them leaves you cold, I can relate. I felt the same way until I tried it.

Now I use mayonnaise as a base for nearly every marinade I use, whether I'm cooking on the grill or at a cast iron skillet indoors. Thank you very much for mentioning the cast iron skillet indoors. I thought you were gonna decide that I just don't have the constitution for grilling if I don't wanna go out in 65 mile an hour winds.

Trash flying around. I was going to say, I was very tempted to add mayo to your puri puri chicken marinade. So I really enjoyed it. I didn't make your chimichurri sauce. I made one just the way I usually do. But you know, the same idea where it's just parsley, some hot pepper, garlic. I use red wine vinegar, a little bit of dried oregano, and it's just so good. You know, there are so many herby green sauces in the world,

but not all of them have vinegar or lemon in them. And that's what I always think what makes chimichurri like more special. Lemon, okay, yeah. Well, because not all chimichurris have lemon in them. But they all have acidity. They all have acidity. Everyone I've seen has either has lemon. I think red wine vinegar is even more common,

but it could be either. But like, if you were making a basil pesto, you're not gonna put an acidic ingredient in there. So in your recipe for the New York Times, we take boneless, skinless chicken breasts. We pound them to a quarter inch thick. I would not say I got them that thin, but you know, I worked on it. Right. I did my best. And then we take a mixture of mayo and you're going to

talk about why you like to marinate with mayo and a mixture of that and shimmy churri. And we marinate it for, I think you call for, it's like a minimum. You say you can use it right away, but you could also use it up to a day later, that same timeframe. I have marinated it for about 52 minutes. 52, about 52 minutes. That's how far I've gone ahead. All 52 of which I spent debating whether I wanted to go outside. I'm just, I'm not made of what it takes to be a good girl.

It's okay. You can say it. I don't have the constitution for it, but it was crazy out there. I'll go out any other day with my umbrella. So, how did you feel slathering raw poultry with mayonnaise and with your bare hands? It did not bother me one bit, but I also used tongs. You used tongs, okay. I used tongs. I just tossed it all together. I basically made the mixture at the bottom of the bowl. I had pounded out the chicken breast cutlets to, I will say, half-inch thick at best.

to, I will say, half inch thick at best. I just don't enjoy the pounding part. So I did that. So then I seasoned it right on that tray where I had done it. I seasoned it with a lot of salt and pepper, and then I just mixed the chimichurri that I just made with the mayo, tossed it all together, put some plastic on the bowl, put it in the fridge for 52 minutes. Texted you about how it was really gross out and I didn't want to go outside.

And then you're like, thank God ignored me. I'm like, don't mind me, I'm just fetching. Just a normal Wednesday night with the recipe with Kenji and Deb. And then the weather got worse and I pulled out my grill pan and grilled it inside. So yes, I did not use, I used a fake grill which I bought many years ago

when I did not have access to an outdoor grill. And it wasn't the same, although it looks the same in the pictures. How did it come out anyway? Did the kids like it? It was so good. It was so good Kenji. It was like the mayo,

the, I loved having the extra chimichurri on the side because I always like, especially with grilled chicken, I love an, an herby green sauce. I love like a really spicy marinade. I love something to kind of dip the pieces in. It was really nice. The thin pieces were really good. I'm trying to remember like how well the kids ate it but I actually dashed out to tennis after that. But my husband just had the last piece left over on a roll for lunch. I was like, babe, you want me to heat that up or anything? And he was like, no, I got it. He just ate it cold, properly outside.

The peri-peri chicken was a big hit. It came out super juicy. I think spatch cocking and using a thermometer, like it's really, really key for the grill. It came out, yeah, it came out really, really juicy. I like how the marinade, it almost blackens as it cooks, you know, it comes out really, really dark, but it doesn't taste burnt or bitter. It just gets kind of like the sweetness of the peppers and the balance with the heat comes out really nicely.

And then I like having the leftover marinade. I actually, so I added a bunch of extra olive oil to the leftover marinade because I wanted it just a little bit sort of broken and a little looser, but we use that for vegetables on the side that we grilled on the side, some zucchini and some asparagus. And then I also used it this morning.

I just had some fried eggs that I put a bunch of that, that leftover sauce on the chicken. I'm so glad you're into it. When we come back from our break, Kenji and I are gonna interrogate each other with a lot of questions about grilled chicken, and then we'll have our wrap up questions too. Hey everyone, welcome back to The Recipe with Devin Kenji. Deb, I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about your Piri Piri Chicken recipe.

Oh boy, ask away. So I'm particularly curious because in The Re, you talk about, so it's a dish that you tasted on vacation in Portugal. You said you had it, particularly you enjoyed it because it was such a kid-friendly restaurant recipe, and Portugal was a particularly kid-friendly place. But when you're developing a recipe like this, you know, from the way you write about it, it feels like you came home and you found a bunch of existing recipes and then you kind of triangulated from there. Can you talk a little bit about that sort of process,

about you taste something in a foreign country and you come home. Now, how do you go about recreating that in your home kitchen? It is so tricky and you often get into these, you can kind of get very knotted up with questions of authenticity and whether I'm, I don't want to misrepresent the dish. I don't want to call the dish something

that's not. I want to know what the hard stops are. We're like something that somebody from Portugal would say, we would never put that in purie purie chicken. It's absolutely, you know, that's no longer purie purie chicken. So you want to know what the kind of loose rules are. But in the end, I also wanna work with ingredients I can get at the grocery store. A flavor I remember that may not be like the ur-puri-puri chicken, but it was my favorite one that we had.

And just to make it reasonable and to work for people at home. So it's a lot of things to put together. And what I tend to do is a lot of reading about the dish, a look at a lot of recipes, and then I will close every one of those tabs and start from obviously not scratch, but from well, here's a sort of framework of a recipe.

And then I started adjusting as I'm in the kitchen. Do you remember what recipes you looked at here or what sources you were looking at when you were starting the research on this one? I know it was a long time ago now. I will always, and now it was a bunch of years ago when we came back from Portugal and I should also say that we were traveling with a one-year-old. It was our first international

vacation with a one-year-old who doesn't remember any of it. It was very cute, very cute in photos. I definitely know that I had, I looked up as many, I pulled out as many Portuguese cookbooks as I could and also looked up as many online that like, you know, I could kind of preview online because I always like to start with cookbooks. Read as much about the dish as I could. Looked at a lot of recipes. Honestly, I would say that about 90% of the recipes start with bottle peri-peri sauce.

That's how, is it Nando's? Most people are making it like that. Yeah, that's my familiarity with the recipe because I spent a lot of time in the UK and yeah, Nando's Peri Peri is like what my vision of the dish is. Exactly, and it's not that and I always want to make that clear.

But I also went, then I looked at the ingredients of Nando's. Right. But what are the flavors and how can I get those flavors in and how can we make this? And again, there's a definitely, I haven't read in a while, but there's definitely a clear disclaimer that may not be what is authentic to you. And I think that that happens whenever you're making a food that's from another place in

time. It may not be the way your grandmother made it. It may not be the way the restaurant down the street made it. It may not be the correct way, but I'm using my impressions. I'm basically gathering as much authentic information as I can. And then I always feel that it's my job to make it work for people at home. Because if I can't get piri piri peppers easily, like what's close? Okay, Google tells me that this pepper is close.

Right. Well, that's why I felt comfortable using a red Fresno chili, even though it's nothing like a piri piri. As you should. As you should. But a lot of times when we talk about authenticity, and these are extremely important conversations to have, and it's extremely important to know where food comes in and what makes it correct when you're writing recipes and developing recipes and representing recipes from places

that you're not from or don't live. At the same time, we could drive ourselves crazy looking for a very specific ingredient that is authentic because it's there. It's something that's grown there. It's something that's easy to get. And if that person, if the same culture was transplanted here, we would either be growing that pepper here or they would be using some pepper we had here that was close enough to get to that flavor.

So, when you start going crazy going online to find the perfect pepper, I'm not saying you shouldn't do that if it doesn't taste like period period chicken to you without the period period pepper. But if you're just trying to go for the gesture of the sauce or Smitten Kitchens interpretation of good period period chicken, I've got a recipe for you. Right, well, cause sometimes, yeah, cause I think sometimes the authenticity of a dish

is built into not necessarily the ingredients of the dish, but the spirit of the dish, right? Like I have a cassoulet recipe where there's debate in France about what goes into a real cassoulet, right? But generally you can say it's not, well, it's not chicken, right? But I have a cassoulet recipe that calls for chicken because it's like, well, wherever you are in France, the cassoulet is like, it's a peasant dish. And the reason they're using duck or they're using goose or they're using pork or whatever

it is, is because that's like available and inexpensive there. So if like the thing in your supermarket that's available and inexpensive is chicken, then that makes chicken an authentic ingredient for this type of dish. I think that's really important. And you know, this is a recipe developer, like, you know, as you were saying, they're using duck because that's what they've got there, that's the game. So how much can we interpret before losing the spirit or the gesture or what matters about the dish

and what matters about the dish could be subjective, but there are some things that everyone agrees on, like what herbs belong in stuff and what doesn't belong in. So. I think it was delicious, yeah. This is definitely a recipe I will be repeating. And you know what I liked is that it called for half a bell pepper, which I think would normally be a mark against a recipe, but it left half a bell pepper to use as a salad. I almost always like to make some kind of salad when I'm grilling meat, you know, because

I find it's just like an easy thing to throw together and it always goes well. And so it left to help half a bell pepper for a salad. So I think that worked out nicely anyway. Well, Kenji, now we've talked, I feel like we've had a lot of my questions, which, yeah, good job, guys. Us. But I wanted to ask you, how important is some oil or fat in a marinade? Because I know we talk about fat soluble flavor compounds and aromatics.

Like how does this work? Because I don't think we always realize, we think, oh, I don't need to have oil in this, but you really do want to have something because it carries the flavor in a way that vinegar or something else will not. But can you talk about the science of it? I think, I mean, there's some exceptions, but yeah, you generally do want to have

some kind of oil in your marinade. Yeah, well, first of all, it will carry fat soluble flavor compounds. So, imagine you have a teabag that's full of whatever, whatever your vegetables, say your garlic and your onions and parsley, right? Those are the three things in your marinade, garlic, onions, and parsley,

and you have a teabag full of them. And you have a bowl of, you have a cup of hot water and you have a cup of hot fat, right? If you steep your teabag in the hot water, there's certain flavors that are gonna come out. And if you steep that teabag in the hot fat, there's certain flavors that are gonna come out. And if you steep that teabag in the hot fat, there's other flavors that are gonna come out. And generally the ones we find more desirable

and more plentiful are the ones that are soluble in the fat. So you can basically make a stronger, you know, marinated tea out of the fat than you can out of any water. And that includes water-based liquids. So things like, you know, vinegar is mostly water, lemon juice is mostly water, milk is mostly water. So anything that's mostly water,

you would count as water in a marinade. But yeah, so fat, basically it's going to extract more of those flavorful compounds and also kind of distribute them more evenly on your meat. It also adds protection, you know, and more evenness of browning. So like, whereas water-based liquids, they draw energy away from the food as they evaporate.

And so you're kind of preventing browning and preventing the heating of the exterior from going too fast by having more water-based liquids until it evaporates off. Fats, what they'll do is they'll coat the food so that they make the heating more even. So they even out hot hot and cool spots and so your meats will kind of brown a little better and they'll brown more evenly. It'll keep them from drying out more. So like chicken that's been coated in a marinade with fat in it, like a boneless skinless chicken breast, it won't turn dry or stringy as

easily as one that's in a water-based marinade. With the mayo marinated chicken, we don't like oil anything. The mayo is the oil. The mayo is the oil, yeah. You talked about liking the color of the puri puri chicken and I mentioned that I do tend to like marinades with, it's not about the sweetness, but I do like the way a little bit of something sugary

or acidic or something like a pepper in there. It gives the heat something to blacken. or, uh, you know, something like a pepper in there. It, it gives the, it gives the heat something to blacken. Right. And maybe it's just an aesthetic, but I like the way it looks when there's little spots of char in dark parts of grilled meat. It looks more appetizing and I think it tastes better. Oh, I agree. I mean, I think with grilled foods, you know, I, I like to go sort of beyond brown.

Well, like, like with, I don't know, like when you're talking about like French cooking, like at a French restaurant, like the chef will tell you like, as dark as you can get it without being black, you know? Is a good color to aim for, like when you're building a crust on a steak or a chicken breast or something. But with grilling, I think you go, I like to go further.

Like I like to have some kind of charred bits. Also, I feel like, especially with like, I don't know, like a bottled barbecue sauce on skin on chicken, it's not actually the chicken burning. It's a little bit of the sauce and that's not going to taste bad. If your actual chicken was blackened, it may not taste, I mean the flesh of it, it may not taste very good, but a little bit of sauce with some char on it, it actually makes a bottled sauce taste a lot more interesting.

Yeah. A lot of sauces have quite a bit of, like bottled sauces will have quite a bit of sugar in them. And even like your, you know, like the peri-peri marinade that you use, it has shallots and garlic and red bell peppers and all those things have quite a bit of sugar in them. Like all that vegetable matter is going to be pretty high in sugar. And so yeah, so there is the Maillard reaction going on, you know, which is like the sort of the protein and the reaction between the proteins and the carbohydrates when you heat them. the sort of the protein and the reaction between the proteins and the carbohydrates when you, when you heat them, the sort of, the browning reaction

that we think of when we're talking about sort of, you know, browning a steak or browning chicken, but there's also straight up caramelization of the sugars going on, right. And then I think that that's where we're getting some of the more blackened flavors and yeah, you're right. That I think if we just had, if we just had plain chicken breast that didn't have any kind of marinade on it at all and it got to the point where it's black, it's gonna taste burnt.

Yeah, it's not gonna taste good. But when you add a sort of sugary marinade or even something with vegetables in it, that blackenedness is going to be a lot milder because it's just from the caramelization of the sugars as opposed to sort of the blackening of the proteins. I'm ready to grill chicken now. I'm finally ready.

And the weather is with me today. It's actually a beautiful sunny day. Kenji, can you waffle grilled chicken? I don't think so. You could put grilled chicken on a waffle. You could do grilled chicken on a waffle. But you know, I'm kind of of the mind that once you've grilled chicken? I don't think so. You could put grilled chicken on a waffle. You could do grilled chicken on a waffle. But you know, I'm kind of of the mind that once you've grilled chicken,

the best way to eat it is cold. You know, like. Ah, my husband agrees with you. Cause it's already got a ton of flavor built into it. I think cold with the sauce is good. I've also got like a, like a knock chum, like a seasoned fish sauce that I think will go really well. That's one of my favorites for chicken.

Yeah, with cold grilled chicken, it's really good. But I don't know if I would put it on a waffle, if I would heat it up for a waffle situation. It would have to be a deeply savory one, like a cornbread waffle. Yeah, maybe mixed into the waffle batter, into the corn batter. I don't know.

Or maybe put in a quesadilla that you put into the waffle. Okay. So that would work with the does it taco question. It definitely is a quesadilla. Because tacos are quesadillas. And obviously you could put grilled chicken in it. Are we just comfortable calling tacos quesadillas?

No, no, we're talking about tortillas. So if you want to flatten your taco and put some shredded chicken in it and add cheese, then we have a quesadilla. But I also think grilled chicken is excellent in a taco. Sure, this one definitely tacos, yes. Can you fry it in butter in a pan? I wouldn't. I would not.

I wouldn't. No. Does it leftover? Yes, but only cold? I think left, cold or enveloped in cheese and stuck into hot things. Does it come easily out of kids clothes? Usually. I wouldn't call it easy, but I'd say it does.

I'll let you know tonight. I did like how in your story about this period of period chicken, you noted how many of the restaurants you're in Portugal, it was like, you were saying how it was like one of those things where when your kids look like they're on the verge of a breakdown, and then suddenly like somebody from across the restaurant

makes a face at them and entertains them and they're okay. And that like, it just felt like that was continuously happening. And then someone in your comments was saying that they take it like that this is an invitation to like make faces at kids in restaurants. And I think yes. Yes, please throw us a bone. Entertain the kids in the restaurants. If you see kids and you like to make faces at kids, then like make faces at kids because the parents will be grateful for it I think. I, yeah, I have so many thoughts about this. That was our first big international vacation with kids but we also take them out to eat

a lot and I get a lot of questions about it in some other episode but I also feel like it's, it's stressful and it's not because the kids are terrible kids or badly behaved they just have attention spans of like five minutes maximum. And they don't savor a two hour meal the way we do. But I found that restaurants in Portugal, to say a whole country is a unilateral thing is ridiculous, but it was very friendly. Columbia is similar. Columbia is like very, very kid friendly.

Both the people, but also just the spaces are set up for families. Especially like restaurants in the countryside always have outdoor space for the kids to play. Even restaurants like in the cities, they generally have like kids areas or they'll have like kids special, like special kids nights where they get to make the pizza or whatever. Like it's just go, yeah, go taking the kids to Columbia

is always, it always feels like you have just like built-in aunts and uncles everywhere you go. I love it. I love to go places where babysitters are not a big thing. And so people just bring their kids with them. And so you're not the odd person out taking your kids to dinner. You're actually one of everyone.

Yeah. And then they get to enjoy what you enjoy too. Anyway, that is the whole other episode, but I think we're good for grilled chicken. And I hope everybody goes out there this weekend and doesn't just burn their food, but makes it better. We want to hear from you. So if you want to reach us, you can find us at therecipepodcast.com

or at Kenji and Deb on Instagram. And we now have a phone number where you can call us. It's 202-709-7607, and you can leave us a voicemail. The recipe is created and co-hosted by Deb Perlman and Jay Kenji Lopez-Alt. Our producers are Jocelyn Gonzalez, Perry Gregory, and Pedro Rafael Rosado of PRX Productions. Edwin Ochoa is the project manager. The executive producer for Radiotopia is Audrey Mardovich, and Yuri Lasordo is director of network operations. Cher Delva, Apu Gotay, Emmanuel Johnson, and Mike Russo handle our social media. Thank you for listening.

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