I won an electric vacuum marinating tumbler machine in a cooking competition. I have not had a chance to try it yet.

Now I may try that on chicken breast first.

Do you have an injector?

If not, you may want to give that a try.

dcarch

You can butterfly the breasts or make a slit for herbs and spices. Any cuts that you make will allow seasoning to penetrate. I do have an injector that I use, and more recently I used it to inject Habanero sauce into tiny Japanese plastic bottles. Some of the bottles are shaped like pigs, and they hold 2.75 teaspoons, or almost 1 Tbsp.

Lars

Yes, marinating works. 1-3 days.

Lars, do you have a picture of the bottles or the pigs you injected? I'd love to see them.

Roasting would help. Put them on a low sided sheet pan, instead, with some vegetables underneath to hold them up and keep them moist. The dutch oven retains so much moisture that the bird doesn't get a chance to get all roasty toasty.

Apple juice. Marinate overnight with whatever spices you use and apple juice. It will break down the cell structure and allow the spices to reach deep into the meat.

I have a foodsaver and the marinating box that goes with it. It's very good.

The chicken tasted good and the pan juices were awesome, but the chicken itself did not taste like lemon salt or garlic. Can you really "flavor" meat with spices or is the best you can hope for is to flavor the outside strong enough to influence your taste buds. Often with the boneless breasts I pound them to uniform and then coat them with some knd of sauce or coating. But these bone-in breasts are coated with skin, which I am actually not that fond of, although I hate to waste it.

The classic combo of oil, acidic and flavoring does reach into the interior given enough time. I use equal parts oil and -one or both- of fruit juice and soy sauce.
Then whatever flavorings (herbs, spices, sugars), sweet or savory.
I might make small slits but it can detract from the finish presentation.

If you really want the flavor all through the interior of the meat, it's best to inject it. Marinating will get it into the first quarter inch or so. If you did it for longer, it would go farther, but at the risk of turning the meat to mush.

What the skin on does is help keep the meat moist by slowing evaporation and holding in the fat. You can lift the skin, if you're not going to eat it, and put your seasonings right on the flesh, then drape the skin back over for cooking, or remove it altogether if you have enough other moisture. Put a ramekin of water or ice cubes in the oven, and you have a steam oven, which could help.

There aren't many flavors that penetrate deep into flesh, however. One solution is to plan to make a sauce/gravy from the drippings to add your seasonings back on top. People have been doing that for centuries. :) The flavors that penetrate the most, without injecting, in my experience are citrus, strong herbs (e.g., basil) plentifully stuffed under the skin and into the natural crevices, and garlic.

I had to do a little googling before I roasted the bone-in breasts to find out roughly the times and temp, etc. I came across Kenji Lopez-Alt's blog where he was singing the praises of bone-in roasted chicken in terms of flavor. Untl just recenty I lived somewhere I could get boneless chicken breasts for $1.99/b. on sale on a regular basis. Might have been a side benefit of having a couple of huge poultry "farms" just up the road, but anyway, I am all about low-fat, low-cost protein, so I would load up the freezer with it and had developed a whole repertoire of recipes and methods for it. Just as KLA stated, the cooked boneles breast has virtually no flavor so you make a sauce for it or cut it up and add it to a flavorful mix. And on the flip side, I also noticed the bone-in breast had great CHICKEN flavor, but only the skin and pan juices had the garlic lemon flavors I added. Next time I will put the aromatics under the skin. I could skin and de-bone the breasts but I have such a tiny kitchen, limited time and limited enjoyment for fussing with food, so I'm always looking for quick and dirty albeit tasty methods.

Here is a link that might be useful: Serious Eats

lpinkmountain -- I agree with you about bone-in breasts. I don't know what they feed the birds now-a-days, but they are so thick and meaty -- and bland,bland, bland.

I would much prefer small, less-meaty chicken breasts.

Presalting for 12 to 24 hours makes a difference. Seasons the chicken breast all the way through.

~Ann

Though I don't use bone-in breasts, while making Indian curry chicken I cut slashes--maybe 3--in each breast, then sprinkle lemon juice over and salt very well. They then rest for about half an hour before I proceed with browning of the breasts, etc.

Soaking chicken in a bowl of water and vinegar in the fridge really wakes up the flavor. I read this in a pioneer cookbook, tried it, and it's really amazing.

Now that I think about it, it wasn't a pioneer cookbook, it was "The Little House (on the prairie) Cookbook". The vinegar and water tip is to make a chicken taste fresh like it was just running around the farm. Or prairie. Just made myself laff....

Last night I made roast skinless, boneless chicken thighs, seasoned with s/p, garlic, white wine, oregano and a dash of cumin. Added onion, green pepper, olives and raisins to the pan. Extremely yum, and no problem with flavor because the ratio of meat to seasoning was much lower than with the bone-in, skin-on breasts, IMHO. I can get the boneless thighs cheap here but not the breasts . . . odd. But anyway, if I keep it up with buying these bone-in breasts I may cut the meat and skin off of them for serving and cover them with a sauce made from the pan juices, then save the meaty bones for soup. I was going to more or less do that anyway, it's just that my first time I served the whole dang thing on a plate! In my defense, it took so long to roast them that I was pretty hungry! :)

I find that sous vide chicken breasts are far more flavorful than conventionally cooked chicken breasts.

I'll leave it to the experts to speculate why--probably has something to do with contact time between the seasonings and the meat and the fact that sous vide chicken breasts are much juicier than regular chicken breasts.

The other day I got some of those huge Dolly Parton chicken breasts from Sam's, cut them in half lengthwise, sprinkled them generously with Penzey's 'Tuscan Sunset' (a salt free general Italian seasoning), vacuum sealed them and froze them; later sous vided them at 149 for about 5 hours. They came out delectably juicy and flavorful.

In case you think I'm proselytizing for sous vide, well, maybe I am. And I just got the new Anova device which is much easier to store than the home made contraption I shared with y'all a couple of years ago. If you have a vacuum sealer already, it really is worth springing for the Anova unit for $199; it will change the way you cook.

Here is a link that might be useful: anova sous vide

This post was edited by arley on Wed, Feb 4, 15 at 8:53