Chicken Recipes - Simple, Baked, Fried & More | Taste of Home (2024)

FAQs

What makes baked chicken taste better? ›

Marinate, Marinate, Marinate!

If you're making a stir fry or chicken bake, tenderizing your chicken prior to marinating makes it even more tender and juicy. Simply cut the chicken breast into bite size pieces, coat evenly with about one teaspoon of baking soda per pound of chicken, and let sit for 20 minutes.

Just because the chicken is already cooked doesn't mean it can't benefit from a rub. Before reheating, make a custom blend of your favorite spices like paprika, cayenne, onion or garlic powder. Mix in dried herbs or a bit of sugar for beautiful caramelization, then sprinkle it evenly over the skin.

Overcooking leads to dry, tough, sawdusty meat with nearly no flavor. High doneness temperature for food safety. Salmonella is the food safety enemy in chicken that dies only at higher temperatures. But cooking chicken breast to an instant thermal-kill doneness temperature will cause it to dry out excessively.

Mix salt, basil, rosemary, garlic powder, mustard powder, paprika, black pepper, thyme, celery seed, parsley, cumin, cayenne pepper, and chicken bouillon together in a small bowl until blended. Use immediately or store in an airtight container for future use.

It's best to marinate your chicken overnight to give the flavours plenty of time to infuse. A faster way to add flavour is to simply brine your chicken in salty water prior to cooking. This will help tenderise the meat and add extra flavour.

When chicken is covered while baking, it traps steam and moisture within the dish, resulting in juicier results. The covering helps prevent excessive evaporation and keeps the chicken moist throughout the cooking process. Preventing dryness. Chicken tends to dry out more quickly when exposed to direct heat.

Brines and marinades help tenderize the meat by bringing more moisture in the protein. With that extra moisture, you lose less when you cook.

Just sprinkling a little salt on top of your chicken right before cooking it will only season the surface. But seasoning the chicken with salt well ahead of time or brining it in a salt-water solution will draw salt deep into the meat, resulting in a very tasty piece of chicken.

You see, without a generous sprinkling of kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, your chicken is basically destined for blandness. After you've pulled your chicken out of its marinade (or even if you're not using a marinade), always sprinkle all sides of the breast with salt and pepper.

How to get seasoning to penetrate chicken? ›

For maximum flavour, you'll want to make sure your seasoning can penetrate the surface of the chicken. By slicing small cuts into the skin, you can apply the seasoning mixture deeper inside so that you keep more of the taste within it.

Brine. Like a marinade, a brine helps chicken breast soak up as much moisture as possible before cooking. It only requires three ingredients: water, salt, and a pinch of sugar.

You see, without a generous sprinkling of kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, your chicken is basically destined for blandness. After you've pulled your chicken out of its marinade (or even if you're not using a marinade), always sprinkle all sides of the breast with salt and pepper.

Season generously all over (inside and out) with salt and pepper. A good rule of thumb is about 1 Tablespoon salt for an average 4-5 pound bird, and I prefer a Kosher-style salt, like Diamond. Plus the salt acts as a brine and will keep the chicken very moist.

To taste good, chicken must be cooked on the bone yet so much of what is sold is cooked in the form of filleted thighs and breast which is just tasteless, dry and awful.