Perfect Chicken Breast at home (According to Food Science)

from pan seared to grilled to sous-vide there are thousands of videos touting how to make perfectly juicy chicken breast I myself have added a couple but looking back on them I kind of realized this is a terrible approach to teaching people how to cook chicken breast because with this approach we often speak in general tips like you should sous vide your chicken to keep it juicy you should brine your chicken first to keep it juicy or maybe you should cook it to 155 degrees internal to keep it juicy and most of this is pretty solid advice in fact I myself gave the recommendation to cook breasts 255 degrees Fahrenheit in my video three years ago but if that's the case then why in one of the experiments I'll show you today does the breast that I pulled off at 155 degrees Fahrenheit is much drier and has 10 percent less juices than the breasts that I pulled off at 165 degrees and the issue with this approach is that we never get to the core food science principles that every great chicken breast has regardless of the technique that is used and I want to change that in this video for example instead of saying use insert the technique of your choice to cook great chicken breast in this video we will be asking and answering questions such as what makes chicken breast juicy in the first place and how does it lose those juices then continuing on you know what makes chicken taste good and you may be wondering why does any of this stuff even matter well chicken breast is probably one of the most cooked proteins in the world these days and also one of the least forgiving however once you challenge your assumptions and understand the core food science principles you'll learn to think for yourself and unlock an exponentially increase your cooking knowledge and my hope is that this video helps you cook not just chicken but any cut of meat in every recipe for the rest of your life also if you don't care about the why behind any of this stuff I'll give you my basic recommendation up front here's how I cook chicken breast 95 of the time at home first and most importantly thin out the breast secondly add salt at some point in the process thirdly flavor with spices marinade sauces or herb mixes fourth sear over high heat with whatever fat you have on hand fit remove at 155 degrees Fahrenheit to minimize firmness and total cook time and then slice and enjoy there's no special equipment no day-long grinding necessary it takes less than 10 minutes and that's all you need to do to make great tasting juicy chicken breast at home now you'll notice I purposely worded in some caveats in that blueprint based on what we're going to learn in the rest of this video and speaking up for this video I'm assuming that a theoretical perfect chicken breast has these characteristics one you want a juicy and tender interior secondly well seasoned and then third a brown and flavorful exterior and several years ago I thought plain chicken breast was terrible so I would douse it in any mix of spice rubs or sauces but after I learned how to cook I realized that grilled chicken with salt in a nice crust can be absolutely addictive and your perfect chicken breast may look a little bit different than mine you may like it a little bit more on the tender side I may like it a little bit more on the juicy side but using the information in this video you'll be able to dial in the juiciness and tenderness of chicken breast exactly to your liking before we dive in thank you to today's sponsor bright sellers bright sellers sends wine directly to your door so you don't need to waste time at the store and after taking a seven question quiz bright sellers will personalize and match you with wines from all around the world curated to your taste and Palette and as someone who loves ingredient deep dyes what I love most about bright sellers is that each wine comes with an education card to outline tasty notes suggested pairings best serving temperatures and the origin so drinking the wine is obviously great but it's also fun to cook with I made a white wine pan sauce to slather over some seared chicken breasts that is just spot on bright settlers has a limited time offer of up to 100 off your first four boxes of wine so click the link in the description to get started and thank you again for sponsoring this video so where does our journey start well have you ever thought about like why do we even cook meat in the first place and simply put there are really just two reasons firstly is food safety and second is food quality such as taste texture and Aroma now this video is a deep dive on the food quality side with the juiciness and tenderness of the chicken breast but let me quickly Breeze through the safety stuff first so what exactly makes chicken breast dangerous to eat well as noted on the CDC website chicken can be a nutritious choice but raw chicken is often contaminated with campylobacter bacteria and sometimes with salmonella and clostridium bacteria and eating that bacteria can potentially make us sick so how do we kill it through heat and cooking the official recommendation of the USDA and CDC is that chicken should be cooked to an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit so why is this 165 degree number so special well this is the temperature at which these bacteria are instantaneously killed at a seven log reduction meaning one cell out of 10 million might survive so is reaching 165 degrees the only way to reach the seven long reduction in these bacteria well it turns out that it's not in fact killing or reducing bacteria is actually a product of both temperature and time and the USDA has a table in the fsis cooking guideline for meat and poultry products that lists out temperatures and how long that temperature needs to be held to reach the seven long reduction of salmonella since chicken breast is typically between one to three percent fat this portion of the table is most relevant but the basic conclusion is that a lean chicken breast cooked to 145 degrees and held for 8.6 minutes or 155 degrees and held for just 45 seconds or 160 degrees for 14 seconds have the same seven log reduction of bacteria as chicken breasts cooked to 165 degrees so if you want more reading I'm going to list all of those sources down below for a little bit of extra reading but the question is if it's safe to cook it below 165 do we get a significant benefit from doing so well as you could guess yes and it may have the biggest effect on both the tenderness and juiciness when that chicken breast is cooked and here's where things get fun because we need to figure out what even makes chicken breast juicy in the first place as noted in on food and cooking a cut of meat is made up of just three basic components you have water protein and fat and what's important to know is that every cut of meat and animal will have a slightly different makeup and as noted in this article from the USDA leaner meat and poultry contain more protein and less fat and since water is a component of protein but not fat a leaner cut will contain slightly more water on a per weight basis for example a very lean chicken breast with no skin is roughly 75 percent water 20 to 25 protein and just one to three percent fat whereas a chicken thigh on the other hand no skin again is around 70 percent water closer to 15 or 20 percent protein and around 10 percent fat or a well-marbled rib eye from a steak is something like 70 water 15 protein and 15 fat so can you guess why this information is important well the fat and water content is what creates the juices when we cook it however in this case since chicken breast because it's so low in fat that means the juices are almost completely water and we'll get into why shortly but this is the reason why chicken breast dries out so easily so if our goal is to get juicy chicken that means we need to figure out the base principles of this question and that is how do we minimize water and fat loss during the cooking process or put another way how do we maximize moisture retention and to answer that you may be wondering where exactly is all this water in the chicken breast and how exactly does it get out because I can wring out a sponge and get water I can't exactly wring out my chicken breast so the structure of any cut of meat is generally made up of one muscle fibers two connective tissue like collagen and then thirdly is the fat tissue and the qualities of the meat such as the texture color and flavor are primarily determined by the arrangement and proportion of these three tissues so where exactly is the water well remember being told when you were younger that humans are like 60 water and it seemed kind of shocking at the time well it's the same concept water is abundant in all living things and by extension in almost all of the foods we eat unless steps have been taken to remove it however even if steps have been taken to remove it such as dehydrating your beef jerky this jerky may still have around 20 to 23 percent water left and technically there are two types of water in food you have free water and bound water free water is freely extracted from the food think of pressing or squeezing a piece of citrus and specifically in one of the experiments I did I wet brined and dry brine to chicken breast and as you can guess the wet brine breast actually increased in free water while the uncovered dry brine breast decreased a few grams of the free water and as we'll see this can have significant ramifications on the final product such as the interior juiciness and exterior Browning which can directly affect the flavor so when we cook a piece of meat you'll notice steam coming off and this is water escaping from the food and the free water such as the water on the surface of the breast will steam off first but as the temperature of those muscle fibers Rises they actually start to tighten and constrict pushing out the bound water this bound water again falls into the pan like the free water does and since water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit that rapidly evaporates via Steam and is lost forever now fat on the other hand won't evaporate like water the little fat that is in the breast will render out from the meat and will stay in the pan helping provide some of the juices that will still be on the surface of the meat and hopefully those gears have started turning and you can start to see why cooking a chicken breast is so much harder than cooking a fattier piece of meat like a steak or a chicken dye and even if we're cooking a very lean steak for example we can cook it at a much lower temperature because of the safety of the bacteria in how steak works but since the breast is only like one percent fat and we need to bring it up to a much higher temperature the breast juices are almost entirely reliant on the water content and once that squeezes out it's gone forever so in order to optimize for water retention in the breast we need to look at some important temperature benchmarks from 95 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit is when animal fats will start to soften and melt at below 120 degrees the chicken meat is still considered raw at 120 degrees though the protein myosin strands begin to coagulate forcing that liquid out then at 140 degrees remaining proteins continue to coagulate more forcing all the liquid out now 150 to 155 is my preferred doneness for panzier chicken breast again hold for 45 seconds for that seven long reduction 165 degrees is that instant bacteria Kill Zone 212 degrees is the boiling point of water and then the mayor reaction or Brownian reaction begins slowly at around 250 degrees Fahrenheit before rapidly accelerating on the surface at 320 to 350 degrees and for a tender and juicy chicken breast we have to keep this principle in mind as we're cooking it so the higher the temperature especially above 140 degrees Fahrenheit the firmer the muscle fibers are going to get and the more water is going to be pushed out and evaporated so the dryer are chicken breast becomes and if that's true that must mean a chicken breast cooked to 140 degrees will expel less juice or water than a chicken breast cooked to 150 degrees Fahrenheit and that's exactly what Kennedy showed in this article where he sous-vide two chicken breasts the 150 degrees Fahrenheit expelled nearly two times the amount of water now what I'm about to tell you is going to confuse you but also set us up for one of the biggest breakthroughs I think I've had when cooking chicken breast at home so I did some testing of my own on grilled chicken breast both cooked to 150 to 5 degrees internal one of them ended up dry at just 79.6 moisture retention of the original weight but the other one was nice and juicy with a moisture retention of 91.4 percent of the original weight so what's going on here is either me or Kenji fudging the numbers and no we are not we just cooked them in very different ways and like I said the conclusion from this experiment will make the biggest difference in the chicken breast that you make at home so I grabbed out four equal sized chicken breasts all roughly the same size by weight two of them I thinned out using a knife until flat and these ended up being roughly half the size thickness wise two of them I didn't do anything to and I recorded the starting weight for each and then we'll be cooking one thick and one Thin breast both to 155 degrees Fahrenheit and 165 degrees Fahrenheit so at the stove I laid down some oil then seared them over medium-high heat at 375 degrees Fahrenheit and during this time again I recorded the weights at starting then pulled them off to weigh again while they cooked and here is the graph with the weights of each now looking at this there are a couple of key conclusions the thinned out breasts reach 155 degrees Fahrenheit and 165 degrees Fahrenheit in way less time than both of the thick breasts and the thin breasts retain much more moisture so you may be asking yourself is it just because these were cooked longer well that's a small part of it but this is actually still primarily due to the temperature of the muscle fibers in the chicken breast and I hope this next set of Graphics gives you the aha moment that it did for me remember how I said I pulled the thick chicken breast when it reached 155 degrees Fahrenheit well I did do that but I also didn't as home Cooks when we here cook the chicken to 155 degrees internal I think we tend to visualize that the chicken breast is cooked to 155 degrees uniformly all across the breast like this when that's not how it works at all when using a pan the oven or deep frying high temperatures the heat Source conducts to the exterior of the chicken and then it works its way in heating up the chicken from out to in so why is this a big deal well we have a unique problem that we need to solve because of the natural shape of the chicken breast the chicken breast is thick at the top but then it's slightly thicker a half an inch down before slimming down in the middle and finally to the bottom not to mention the entire thing is rounded as well so while the very center of the breast may be 155 degrees Fahrenheit everything around it is going to be cooking at various rates higher than 155 degrees Fahrenheit for example you can see me hitting 154 degrees in the very center of the thick chicken breast but if I pull back from the center you'll start seeing 165 or 175 or the very edges may be all the way up to 205 degrees Fahrenheit and the thermoblog did a really cool test on a whole roasted chicken with three thermometers placed in the outer middle and inside breast and just take a look at this graph where the target pool was 145 degrees Fahrenheit it took just 40 minutes for the outer and middle brass to reach 145 degrees well it took another roughly 40 minutes for the very inside of the breast to reach that 145 degree pool number and the temperatures are going to be slightly different but this exact same phenomena is happening to our bulky chicken breast on the pan and if we visualize it it looks a little something like this instead of an even 155 across the board remember the heat of the pan moves from out to in so on the surface of the breast before we even get inside for brownie we are going to be hitting at least 250 to 320 degrees Fahrenheit meaning as we move just inside that outer ring might be 180 to 200 degrees a little further in might be 170 to 180 then 160 to 170 before finally getting to the very center at 155 degrees Fahrenheit so yeah I pulled that chicken breast off when it reached 155 degrees Fahrenheit internal but in reality the majority of this breast was cooked much higher than 155 and because of this it had 10 percent less moisture than the thinned out breast now when you're roasting a whole chicken you can't really do anything with the breast so pulling it at 145 degrees is a great technique to use but when searing a single breast at home we can apply and thin out the breast and hopefully you can see why thinning is so powerful and leads to a much more juicy breast even if you cook it at 165 degrees by thinning out the breast we are treating it more like a steak which has one uniform thickness and an even surface area so it's going to heat and cook much more evenly so with the thinned out breast our heat map looks a little more something like this we are still hitting that 250 to 320 degrees on the exterior for Browning but with flipping and the even thickness the temperatures reach much more evenly when we add the thinned out breast of the pan the exterior starts steaming and Searing up to the same 250 to 320 degrees Fahrenheit needed for Browning before moving inwards at about two minutes in almost halfway the breast maybe hits 130 to 140 degrees in the center before we flip and go to work on the next side again the Heat's going to go exterior and upward and it starts to Brown as that heat moves in and the other side will start to rise just a bit but not much at six minutes the center might be 150 degrees Fahrenheit and then we'll do one more flip to bring it up to 155 degrees in the very center and remember we only need 45 seconds to hit that seven long reduction so you can pull it off because it should stay there due to carryover cooking so in the final heat map we have a piece of chicken that has more or less uniformly hit 155 degrees Fahrenheit in just seven to eight minutes without those wild swings in temperature due to the thick and unevenness of the bulky breast and what this does is limit the amount of juices that were expelled out and have been evaporated away and again even at 165 degrees this thinned out breast did have a little bit more moisture loss and it's a little bit more firmer but if you like a firm breast this might be perfect for you this experiment you have to try for yourself at home because it is shocking in a side-by-side taste test just how much more tender this one is compared to this one it literally like melts in your mouth I'm actually just salivating over this thing so we learned what makes chicken juicy in the first place we understand how those juices are squeezed out through cooking and hopefully with those graphics and experiments you understand the big picture behind moisture retention now what if I told you there was an ingredient that I left out of the testing and experiments for this that can impact moisture retention and that ingredient is salt you may have heard over the years that brining is the secret to a moist chicken or turkey breast but after going through all this my question is how big of a difference does it actually make wood brining for two hours or 24 save the thick breast or is it a moot point that's really all about temperature also what about a whole roasted chicken versus a singular breast well my friends after cooking about 15 chicken breasts this week I think I'm gonna save those questions for another day and another video but hopefully you have enjoyed this one and hopefully you can Implement these Concepts that we covered in this video for not just chicken breasts but really any types of meat that you happen to be cooking but anyway that will wrap it up for me in this one I will catch you all in the next one peace y'all

Channel: Ethan Chlebowski

Views: 778,396

Keywords: Ethan Chlebowski, chicken breast, how to cook chicken breast, juicy chicken breast, how to make juicy chicken breast, how to cook chicken, chicken recipes, best chicken breast, taste test, chicken breast recipe, cooking chicken, baked chicken, how to, how to cook, chicken recipe, food science, chicken food science, chicken food lab, juicy chicken, juicy chicken breast on grill

Id: lAn4CXk1sQw

Length: 22min 27sec (1347 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 21 2023