Softening chicken

tasha

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Chicken tends to be a little dry when using the breast meat and a great way to solve this problem and to keep it tender and moist is to tenderise it first and then a big secret..... soak it in a little coconut milk and a bit of olive oil to gkeep it tender and juicy.
 
Chicken & turkey, especially the breast meat, can very easily be ruined by overcooking it.
Temps from the internal area are very critical, and should register at about 145 to 150 degrees. Anything higher than that will ruin it and make it dry. :eek:
 
One of the curious things I've noticed is that those pre-frozen chicken breasts they sell at the grocery stores - the ones that say they were soaked in a salt solution - tend to cook up dry, despite being brined. I've brined fresh chicken breasts in the past, and it did in fact make them moister, even though I didn't care for what it did to the texture of the chicken. So it confuses my why these frozen ones cook up so dry. I'm wondering if it's perhaps the freezing itself that causes this.

I've never tried coconut milk as a marinade for thicken, that sounds pretty interesting, but I did try yogurt without much success. It gave the chicken a strange waxy appearance when cooked, and it made the chicken itself smell and taste rotten, so I nixed that method. Also, the skin on the chicken seemed to tighten up and wouldn't brown as well.

With fresh chicken breast, as long as I let it come to room temperature before cooking, and lightly brush it with some vegetable oil or olive oil, I am usually good to go. I think part of the reason some people wind up with dry chicken breast is that they are either trying to cook them from a frozen state or a semi frozen state, in which case the exterior of the chicken becomes way too dry before the pink is all gone in the center. A room temperature piece of chicken will cook much more evenly.
 
I don't like buying chicken from grocery stores especially the breast part. I usually buy them fresh from the wet and dry market. I have no problem with the tenderness and overall juiciness though. Perhaps this is because the chicken we get is killed in the market, too.
 
To soften chicken, even if it's dressed and bought from a reliable grocery store, we first rinse it with water. We chop the chicken according to its various parts - wings, backbone, thighs, breast, drumsticks and neck. Next, we place it on a pot with around four inches of water. We set the gas range to "high" and let the water boil. A fork will be pierced on the skin and if already soft, we add the next batch of ingredients to come up with a chicken broth soup (we soften it for broth purposes almost all the time).
 
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