The Best Grilled Chicken You'll Ever Make (Restaurant-Quality) | Epicurious 101

I'm Frank Proto, professional chef and coloring instructor, and today I'm gonna show you the best way to grill chicken at home, Frank style. We're talking juicy, tender, not overcooked and stringy chicken breast every single time. This is Grilled Chicken 101. Chicken breast is kind of problematic for most beginning cooks because it dries out really quickly. Grilled chicken breast can actually be delicious and juicy. I know people have had dry, stringy chicken breast. This is not gonna be that. The chicken breast has just come out of the fridge. I like to keep it as cold as possible before I grill. One of the things I like to do with chicken breast is pound them out lightly. I have a mallet. This side with the spikes is for meat that is tough, right? Whereas this flat side is for meat that is not tough. So chicken breast is not tough. Don't start whacking at your chicken breast with the tenderizing side. You're just gonna tear it up and ruin it. Basically what I wanna try and do with my meat mallet is even that out. If you cook this chicken breast without pounding it out, this little tail end is gonna cook and get dried out, whereas this one, the fat side, might not be cooked enough. So a lot of times people who pound meat out with a mallet will use cling film, and that's fine. But what I like to do, I get a Ziploc. I'm gonna take off the top of the Ziploc, and I take off the sides of the Ziploc with a knife. And then you get this nice piece of plastic that you can reuse over and over, and it's hinged. Plastic wrap sometimes gets a little fussy. It sticks to itself. I find that sacrificing one Ziploc bag for all of my pounding is well worth it. Chicken breast sometimes have little pieces of fat. I like to just trim them. A lot of times there's a little piece of cartilage and some little bloodlines here. I like to trim those out. I want it to be nice and clean and neat. I'll take the plastic Ziploc, and you don't have to really whack it. You just have to lightly tap. Make sure we're not going on an angle. You wanna be perfectly flat, because if you hit it with an edge, you're gonna get like a divot in your chicken breast. You notice how I'm focusing on the fat side, not the skinny side, right? And get in there and touch it once in a while and see how you're doing on thickness. And I think this one looks pretty good. We're not going for a chicken cutlet here. We're going on the grill. We still need some of that thickness there so we have time to get that char. Let's get the other one in there. This one's pretty good so far. I'm not gonna go too crazy with it. Just lightly hit. I go around. I'm not just pounding in one area. And as I hit, it kind of spreads out under that plastic. It's so much more equal than it was before. And this is gonna allow us to cook it evenly. If it cooks evenly, in the end, it's gonna be juicier, especially if we take it off at the right time. One of the tricks here is to season ahead. And technically, this is called a dry brine. Chicken breast tends to get dry, but if you season ahead, the chicken breast is gonna hold onto some moisture. And basically, it could be from 30 minutes up to 12 hours. If all you have is 30 minutes, season it, put it in the fridge, let it sit for 30 minutes. It's still gonna help you get a moister, juicier chicken breast. This one tip of seasoning ahead is going to bump your game up. If you take nothing else from this video, season your chicken ahead. So, chicken breast down. I get a nice pinch of salt when I season. You notice I'm not close by because if I'm close, I get little dots of salt. If I go up high and sprinkle back and forth, look at that, super evenly seasoned. It looks like a fresh snowfall. I can still see the chicken through the salt. And now all we do is flip it over, season the other side, and then we're gonna put it in the fridge and let it sit for at least 30 minutes up to 12 hours. That's dry brining, people. It is not complicated, it is not scary. It is super easy. And this is gonna make our chicken breast juicier than if you just seasoned it and put it on the grill. It's time to grill our chicken breast. I've let my chicken breast sit in the fridge for about two hours. And there's a couple of things that I like to focus on when I'm grilling, whether it's indoor, outdoor. The first thing you have to do is always make sure your grill is preheated. My outside grill, I usually start heating it up 20 minutes before I plan on cooking. This will not only preheat my grill, it's also gonna give me a chance to clean my grill off. Anything that's kind of left over from my last grilling session kind of carbonizes and I can scrape it off with a brush. Same thing goes for my grill pan and my grill plate. You wanna make sure that it's hot and clean. I've let this preheat on high for about 10, 15 minutes. If you're gonna use a grill pan like this in your house, ventilate. I'm getting a little wavy smoke. I hold my hand on top of it and I can feel that it's hot. If your grill is not hot and clean, your chicken breast is gonna stick. And that's what throws everyone off. I have a paper towel. I have some neutral vegetable oil. Take our oiled paper towel and clean our grill. Now we can season our chicken breast. Now, I want you to be careful here. Because we dry brined it, it already has some seasoning on it. So we wanna go fairly light here. That means just light with a little black pepper. Again, I go high so I get a better dispersion. And again, with my salt, nice and light. Flip it over, let's get our other side. One of the biggest mistakes home cooks make is they do not season their food enough. We've pre-seasoned this with salt, but we wanna make sure that we get the maximum amount of flavor out of this chicken breast. I tend not to do marinades, right? I'm a simple person like this. I find that marinades sometimes burn and make my chicken stick. One last thing I'm gonna do here, even though my grill is clean, I'm gonna hit this with a little olive oil on both sides. Back of the tongs is actually really good to spread out that oil. Not only does it add a little flavor, it helps ensure that we won't stick. When I take my chicken breast and I put it on the grill, I'm going to put it at 11 o'clock. A lot of people would think that when chefs do this, they just wanna get really nice grill marks. And that is part of what we're trying to do. But the other thing is actually, it's kind of like a signal to whoever's watching the grill, what state of cook we're at. If I see that my chicken breast is raw and it's at 11 o'clock, what it tells me is those were just put on the grill. If my chicken breast is at two o'clock, that's telling me the chicken breast has been on for a few more minutes. When I flip it, if it's at 11 o'clock and I see grill marks, that means my chicken breast is about halfway through. Grill marks are a really good way to keep track of how long my chicken has been on the grill. Now, one of the biggest mistakes people make is they put it on here, they start to see a little bit of smoke, they start freaking out, and they get in there, they start trying to move things around. Stop moving things around. I can take a little bit of a look. I have some decent grill marks here. Look, it's not as caramelized as I want, but I'm not gonna worry about it because my chicken breasts aren't super thick. So I'm gonna give it a turn. So I go from 11 o'clock to two o'clock. If you look at this chicken breast here, you can see that the edges are starting to kind of cook and become opaque. It's not raw. I give it a quick look-see, make sure my grill marks look good. I know that it's time to turn. Just remember also with cooking, things take practice. I want you to just pay attention to your food. I do find the best way to get an accurate cook on my chicken breast is to use an instant-read thermometer. When you're grilling outside, it's pretty much the same technique. On outdoor grills, you'll start to notice that most grills have hot spots. Not all of them are the same. After you oil it, the hot spots actually start to look dry, whereas the other spots that aren't super hot tend to look oily. Now, I'm looking at my chicken. I can see it's cooking up. I can see I'm getting a little moisture coming out of the chicken on top, and I'm gonna take it and turn it to that 11 o'clock. So if I have grill marks here and I'm at 11 o'clock, I know that my chicken is halfway there. If you look at this, this is thicker, this is thinner. This is obviously gonna cook faster than that. I'm gonna go and turn again. I'm starting to see a little protein leaking out over here. I'm gonna turn this chicken breast. I think this back one is really close. When I temp my chicken breast, I get my thermometer. I'm gonna take the point and put it in the thickest part of the chicken. Just stick it in there and see where you're at. I'm at about 120. I'm gonna go to about 140, 150. Technically, you're supposed to cook chicken to 165. If you cook a chicken breast to 165 and then take it off the grill, it's gonna be dry and stringy. Once you take it off the grill, it still has some residual heat. It's gonna continue cooking. If I take this off at 165, it's gonna cook up to 170, 175, and that's when it gets dry and stringy. So what I'm gonna do, 150, 155, take it off the grill and let it rest. I'm gonna give it a little poke. I think this back chicken breast is really good to go. I rest it on a rack. Let me temp this chicken breast, see how we're doing. This one's a little thicker. Yeah, we're at about 120 something. So let's give it another couple of minutes on there. Took me 25 years to get down a lot of methods. If it takes you a couple of chicken breasts and you get it right, you're doing great, okay? Don't worry, don't stress. This chicken breast is getting close. I'm gonna take it off and let it rest. The chicken breasts are off of the grill. You'll notice that I have them on a rack. If we put these on a flat plate or a flat pan, it sits and it steams in its own juices, and we don't want that. We've taken the time to try and get nice grill marks. We wanna see those when we're done. If I don't let it rest and I cut that chicken breast, all the juices flow out. Don't skip the step of resting. Resting is super important. We're gonna let this rest for about five to seven minutes. A lot of people ask me, hey chef, I let it rest, it gets a little cold. First thing you wanna do is make sure you're putting it in a warm place. Notice how mine's right next to the grill. If it gets cold, just reheat it, put it in the oven, put it back on the grill for a minute or two and reheat it. Chicken is rested. If you look, there's a little bit of juice underneath and it's still hot. So all I'm gonna do is slice this, plate it with a simple salad. You'll notice on my cutting board, I have two sides. The flat side, I call this the chopping side. And the other side of the cutting board actually has this indentation or groove. It's called a juice groove. So that when I slice my meat, if any juice flows off, it goes into the groove, not into my counter or my table. I'm gonna get this nice piece of chicken here and I'm gonna slice it on an angle. This is just for aesthetics so we can see the meat. It just looks pretty. You can see that it's still juicy. It's gonna be nice and tender. Use my knife as a spatula. Put it on my plate. Give it a little fan so we can see that meat. Got my nice simple salad here. Give it a light toss. A nice little wedge of lemon on here. And this is how I grill chicken breast at home. It's time to taste. Let's get in there. Let's get a little piece of this chicken. It's juicy. It's flavorful. It's tender. That dry brine gives it a nice seasoning. And that dry brine kind of goes throughout the chicken. It's not just on the outside. It keeps it nice and moist. Perfect, easy weeknight meal. Grilled chicken breast does not have to be dry and stringy. Just use the techniques from this video and it's gonna be juicy and flavorful every single time.