The Secret Starts Before This Chicken Hits the Oven

What's good folks? Welcome back to day two of my vlog feast where I'll be uploading the video every day until Thanksgiving. Now if you came here hungry then you came to the right place. Yesterday we got warmed up but today we're stepping into it so let's get it. Okay, so you guys can see, look at these right here. It's a lot of science to go into this, so you guys got to, like, trust me. Don't forget the full ingredient list, including the printable recipe, is on my website. That's smokingandgrillingwithab.com, and that's W-I-T-A-B.com. All right, so even after seeing these ingredients, right, there's not a lot to it. So if I remove both of these chickens, because I'm going to be doing two. But if I remove these, you guys see this, right? Now, when I say it's got a lot to do with, like, science, it does. If you guys go to my website, and I'll write it down and have it every, you know, all of the explanations. But listen, it's really done with the salt. It's the brining process, how the salt goes in. You know, then they push this out. Then it rehydrates it. It keeps it super juicy. So check this out. Now, listen, we're going to get started. I'm going to be talking throughout this process right here. But just to give it to you, you know, in a nutshell. If you want to know what brine really means, look, I'm going to say it like this, almost like, I'm trying to put it in layman's terms. Listen, it makes it juicier, tastier, and it'll be more forgiving to cook, right? And don't let, for the lack of me making it complicated with my explanation, do it. After you do this, you guys can look at any of the other brines that I've made in the past. Everybody says they probably want to brine from here on out. That's the right way to do it, right? So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to get ready to bring my fire Fire underneath. I just added eight cups of water to this. You know what I mean? And then I got it. Listen, I'm using water. We don't want to use no stock or nothing like that. Right now, we're just going to do this and we're going to infuse it with, you know, peppercorns, lemon. You know, I got some herbs. We got garlic. You know, we got bay leaf. Just trust me, folks. This right here is the way you want to go. Okay, so what I'm going to do now is just try to explain this just a little bit easier, right? Let's talk about the salt. What that does is it diffuses deep into the meat so that the chicken is evenly seasoned. So it's not just seasoned on the surface, it's done in the inside also. The salt also loosens the, you know, some of the muscles and the proteins, like I think it's called myosin, which lets the meat bind and retain, you know, it holds more water as it cooks. Translation, check this out. This is juicier chicken Even if you go a few minutes past perfect. That's the whole thing folks. So the meat eats tender and not stringy. Don't forget, this is still chicken, right? That's why we went above and beyond. And then you know what? Last but not least, when you're baking it, listen, it comes with like a better browning, right, if the sugar is added. Now you see I'm using honey, right? A little sugar and a wet brine helps the browning and the balance. Alright, so now we got our water up to a boil, right? So look, I'm gonna get a third cup of this kosher salt. I'm gonna put this over here on the top. You know we just work on this. If a little bit goes over the side it's okay. Now some of y'all right now and I got it the number one question you're gonna ask is man that's a you're gonna say it's a lot of salt first off then you're gonna ask like that's not gonna raise my blood sugar I mean yeah but no excuse me you guys gonna say that's not gonna raise my uh my blood pressure no it's not. You know, so I'm just going to move this around just so that I can get it to, you know, dissolve in this hot water, right? Now, everything else here is really like a dump and go. Look, I got peppercorns. We put that in there, right? Let me go ahead and cut this lemon. We just give it a little squeeze. Drop that in there, right? We got bay leaves. We got herbs. Doesn't make a difference. Just drop your herbs in there. I used to tie them and do all of that. You don't need it. I pulled out my garlic press because that's what I'm used to doing. But we're going to press it a different way. We're going to take the garlic and... Just smash it like that and drop it in, right? Do this with all of them. You want to peel them, you can peel them. You can do that. I promise you, you can just put them in here just like this. I'm going to just do this one just for the sake of those who want to see it, you know, done. We can just peel it like that. And then we drop it. These other ones, I'm not, since they're kind of like open and easy to grab, I will. But I normally don't do it. All right, so now we'll add it. So when I say the sugar, we add that. Then I want you guys to notice how easy this came out. All right, let me go in here and get that last little bit. If you spray this with a non-cooking spray, you can go ahead and, you know, your honey just comes out so much easier. All right, so we still got everything set up for a boil. And this is the flavor profile that we're using, right? But it's the salt that really does the work. The rest of it will be by just adding some of these aromatics in here. This is what gets deep inside of the, you know, the tissue of the chicken. More than likely when you go to like a high-end or one of them fancy like food trucks and you say, oh that chicken is so juicy and all of that, they're probably doing some type of marinade and they're probably brining. You know what I mean? Me, I like brining and... All right, so now I'm going to go ahead and drop my bay leaves in. Now, you know bay leaves, they rehydrate. I think I should say, what's the reason why we're boiling? You know what? Because we got lemon in here. We got aromatics. Look, they're starting to soften up. What it does is when you boil it, it releases this flavor inside of the water, right? And that's where we're going to get that flavor from. This is what we call a profile. This profile, I haven't gave it a name yet, but I'm going to. You know what I mean? And this will be this way. You guys can use your own mind and do whatever. You can substitute the lemon. You can do orange. You can do lime if that's what you're doing. You know what I mean? Just use your brain. Figure out what kind of taste you want to have and how unique you want it to be, and then you put it in here. Now, I'm going to let this boil for probably about 15 minutes, and then when I come back, I'll finish and show you another trick. All right, so look, this has been boiling for about, really about 20 minutes, right? So I'm gonna go ahead and turn this off. Just give it, what I do, anytime I'm stirring it like this, I'm running everything, you know, like my spatula on the bottom, just making sure everything has been dissolved, which I can tell you, 20 minutes under the boiling water, it is. Now I'm finna grab something. I'm gonna step off camera for one second. This bag contains ice. Here's the thing. We took the time to get your aromatics to get into this brine. You got this, It's a salty solution. Everything here is right. Now. Let me grab this because I should have showed you guys this from the beginning. You see this right here? This is what we're going to brine it in. You got to get yourself some type of food grade, you know, bucket, something big enough that you can put a chicken in, you know, that has a lid. This is going to be key. Some of you guys know it's about a million, million of y'all know because, you know, I brine my turkeys also. So I'm going to grab this here and I want to, I want you guys to catch a visual with me. We're going to pour this into that, right? Imagine if that was hot and we put a turkey, I mean, a chicken inside of this, This hot water will start to cook our chicken. That's not what we want. So what we're going to do is we're going to have water. You know what, here, let's not just over talk it, talk about it. Why don't we just go ahead and add this to it? What I'm doing is I'm just cooling it off, folks. I'm getting it ready to be able to put inside of my bucket. Let me know down in that comment section below. Are you guys following? Does it make sense? Have you ever brined? Talk to me. Let me know if you have. What was the outcome? Share it with everybody. Now, look, let's just go over this part about how to clean the chicken, right? I got a sink full of, you know, water. I'm going to go ahead and get myself a cap full of this white vinegar. You know what I mean? Distilled white vinegar, you guys. That's what I use. I rub my hand on it. Then I use lemon. You know what I mean? I like to just put a little of this. A little fresh lemon juice in here. And then if you want to, you guys can just like run this over here. I know this is like a major debate from a lot of people. You guys let me know what you guys do. It's a little vinegar bath, does it? You know what I mean? I just rub this over here like this and boom. You can start feeling the chicken. Even though I got this glove on, it got that when I pull it right there. Because you know why? It's super clean. They get all of that little slick. Everything that make a chicken ugly, it just gets it off, right? I'm going to let this soak in here for about five or six more minutes. I can see that my brine is ready. I'm going to rinse that and then we're going to finish this up. All right, so I do rinse it, you know, rinse my yard bird, right? You could trim some of this up, but I'll get to all that later, right? I'm going to take it and I'm going to just drop it in. It doesn't make a difference how you put it in there, whether it's legs first or wings first. Right. We just want to get this in here like that. If you come over here, let's take a look at my brine. Let me get some more gloves. Look at my brine. You see how it still has ice in it. What does that tell you folks? That should tell you that it's nice and cool. Still got some cubes in there. I don't have to worry about it. Now what we're going to do is we're going to take this and pour that in the inside right there. Now we just pour. What I do is I want to make sure I got enough. You know, sometimes like if I have something that's heavy, I like to just put that on top. You know what I mean? But my main thing is, and be careful if you got a pot that got like a little pour spout on it, that'll be great. You know what I mean? But we're just going to put the top on here like this. Let me get this cleaned up. You can see where I made like a little bit of a mess. Now, I'll just go ahead and wrap this part up right now. What I do is I put this like somewhere, like I'm fortunate enough, I got a pantry, right? So I stick it in the pantry, close the door, keep it nice and, you know, cold, you know, and dark, right? And I put that in there and I like to go, I'm going to say this, six hours at the very minimum, overnight, best practices, you know what I mean? So if you want the maximum amount and the maximum effect of, you know, brining, just an overnight would like get you where you want to be. After I wipe all this up, like I said, into the pantry, put it off to the side. And then I'll see you guys tomorrow because you know what we're doing. I'm going to show you guys how to turn this into something magical for Thanksgiving. All right, folks, look, I want to bring you up to speed. This is what I did. I said I was going to brine the chicken for about four hours. Then I said I was going to do six. You know, just time got away from me. I decided to let it do it overnight. Right. So we didn't brine overnight. So what we did was we took this bird in a salty, slightly sweet bath with garlic, herbs and a little citrus. So this chicken is really seasoned inside and out, not just on the top. All right. So this is what we're going to do. Let's go ahead. And open this up. Completely submerged, right? You know, I know that we got brine in the inside. Let me go ahead and make myself a little room. What I'm going to do is I'm going to pour all of this out of here. Then we're going to rinse the bird. That's going to be key. Because you know what? I get people to say that and I apologize to you guys. You know, like when I'm making it, I just assume everybody know, you know, exactly what I know. But I'm going to be honest with you. You know what I mean? I'm just trying to teach you guys the right right way and get ahead of some of these questions to sort of be as easy as possible. Right? Man, this smells good. I'm telling you right now, you're going to know you're going to like it because, listen, your brine, even with the raw chicken that was in there, I can't say enough about it. It's fire. All right, so now we'll take this cold water, folks, and we're going to rinse it. One of the things you might say, I'll do a little trimming. You see this little piece right here? We'll get all that off. You know what I mean? Trim it up. Get it to look nice. You know, since we're putting this out on the table, this is going to be like our centerpiece. And I say it like that. I know we're doing turkey too, but the chicken, you know, still commands to be a star. And no, I'm not washing off none of the brine because the brine, if we done it correctly, it's in the meat. Okay, so what has changed since the last time you saw it? I put the bird down here. I haven't, you know, finished patting it dry. But everything you see over here on this cutting board, this is what we're going to use for our little compound butter, right? So I'm just going to go ahead and continue to Pat this dry. I know it sounds crazy because we just made it super moist, right? And then I look at the bird and again we want to keep up with the uh the thinking that don't forget this is going to be our one of our centerpieces. I should have said that because I'm not sure what everybody puts on their you know Thanksgiving table, but for me it's the chicken, it's the turkey, and then if And if you guys really know me, you know we got to have that ham. And that's that honey glaze that is. Now, the next thing is, I'm going to leave this and let this sit up, right? I'm going to give you guys all of the, you know, tips and tricks, you know, for like browning. You got to get yourself, you know, a bowl, right? And I think I'm going to go with just adding my Dijon mustard to this right now. Now, let's talk about profiles. I'm using Dijon mustard. I suggest you guys do the same. I usually don't tell nobody to do nothing. You know, do their own thing. But you know what? I'm using a lemon, right? You know, we could have did orange to give it like a little bit of a different profile, but I'm going to set this over here and now we're going to go here with my parsley. And then what we want to do is we just want to chop this up nice. Let's go ahead and get that going. Nice and small. You guys can just see. We got thyme, parsley, rosemary. We're going to use a little lemon juice. Just a little, very little. Right, but then we're going to hit it with that zest. And then, you know, you can't do nothing like this without having no garlic. All right, so now I think I'm going to add... I'll just put it here. I'll just clean my counter. But I'll bring this over here. Now that right there is my Dijon. Now we're going to go ahead and add the butter, right? You know, it's already softened. This is room temperature. You know, just to get it nice and soft. To get it more pliable, that's all. I do have a whip that I may end up using at the end, but right now we'll do that. And now I'm gonna add my herbs to it. I always save a little bit of my herbs cause I just sprinkle some on the top after I get it all buttery and, you know, hooked up. Meanwhile, you know that we getting our oven up to temp. We going to 350, right? So we just work this in. The main thing is you can see your herbs inside the butter because of the color, right? But I'm gonna say the main thing is you wanna make sure that you got that Mustard in here mixed throughout, but you see that right there? We good. I'm gonna set that over here get my press now We're gonna add you know, some minced garlic to it. Now. This is a big wide one. All right So now we got our butter. It's a couple of ways we can do this, right? There's no way you're gonna get around this using your hands. Obviously, I got you know gloves on right? So remember we said we're gonna pat it dry This is why because you want to go ahead and get some of this butter on here now I'll go ahead and massage this butter On here, if it's not as dry as you would like, you'll find out. You're going to be rubbing on this bird, you know, for a minute. I don't know if I should pause right now, but I'm going to go ahead and just pause for a minute. We just put it on like this. This is going to also help it get a little bit crispy. It's really going to help with that color. Then you got to watch all of these little high points like this. These right here have a tendency to burn. When you making, you know, this for Thanksgiving, that means you and your kitchen making other sides and all of that. Chicken should really be made. If you ask me, I would say the chicken should be done the same day. It only takes about maybe a little bit over an hour at three, you know, 350 degrees. But if you in the kitchen, you watching it, if it looks like it's burning, I'm gonna show you all the tent, the tricks. I almost just told you. I'll take it now. What we do is we just put a little tent made out of foil over the top to control the browning. I know some of y'all couldn't wait to say, okay, A.B., that's cool. I do mine like that, too. You know what I mean? But you want to tell me that you take it and you take a little bit of this, and then you run your finger right up underneath the skin over here like this. You see how I separate that skin? I know you guys are doing that already, right? This right here is cool too, but I'm going to be honest with you. If you brine, this is going to be immaculate, tastes great. Once the meat redistributes the juices inside of here, oh my God. You guys weren't able to see how I push it on this side. I'm going to do a little bit on that side so you can see. Check this out. Now, this is what I'm going to be putting it in the oven in, right? I'll take a little bit of that butter. You know what I mean? Look at this. Just put some of this I don't want to spray no other type of like nonstick spray or nothing like that. I'm about to teach y'all this part too. It's just my drippings along with, you know, my chicken stock that I'm gonna put in here. Y'all know what I'm talking about. Now we're gonna go ahead and grab this. Let's go ahead and lay him. Or her. There it is right there. We're going to level this up. Since we're going to put this in there and put that heat on it, it's going to render a lot of drippings. Let me get my gloves cleaned up. Let me get everything going. And then what we're going to do is I'm going to bring these potatoes into the game. Okay, this is what we're going to do now. I'm going to go ahead and cut my, I don't know about y'all, but I got to cut this little piece off. It just look way out to me on a lemon. What we're going to do is when we put this in the oven, we want the aromatics from the orange and then some of these herbs. I got some tied up right here. Let me unloosen these Let me get some more to put in the side. Got to leave a little room, you know, for my herbs. Okay, two things. I'm going to address this part. First, I kept calling this an orange. It's not an orange. It's a lemon. You guys can use orange, but I'm using lemon this time. And I said I was going to take this a little, but no, I'm not. I'm going to just stick this in here just like that. Stick this in here on this side like that. That last little giant wedge in here, just like that. I'm going to go ahead and get me a little olive oil. Just add a little bit here on the back. And then I go over this just a little bit. Just a little bit, that's all we need. Now, let me clean these up, and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna cut down our potatoes. Now we're gonna get to these potatoes. Now, here's the thing. We gotta time this to be ready, right? This is gonna take about an hour and five minutes to an hour and 15 minutes to be done, right? So I'm gonna cut this in a quarter just to look at these right now, just to see where we at. I think this is a good size. And then we'll just put these in here like this. You know what, so let's go ahead and quarter them. But the objective is for everything to be ready at the same time. Okay, so now I take my garlic cloves, you know, smash them. You guys all know just on the other side, get your knife down flat, you know, we just put a couple of pieces inside of here. Come on, man, we got to do, we just go the extra mile when it comes to, you know, the holiday, right? Now I'm gonna take my extra virgin olive oil and this right here is garlic infused. And we're just gonna add a little bit over these quartered potatoes, right? Gotta make sure I'm saying it right. Now we finna level up. Now this right here is that branch and vine. You know what I mean? Just that bacon sea salt. This is what I'm gonna put over here on top of this. Ooh yeah, we using, we pulling out all stops. It's got like a hickory light scent to it. I'll leave a link, you know what I mean? You guys check it out. Ooh man, we getting ready to come with my fresh black crack, right? We just add that right here over the top. My oven is already up to temp. Yes sir. You want to put a little onion in here you can do that too. This is where we're going to do this one right here. Let me take a picture of this bird and in the oven it go. At 350 we're going to go for at least a minimum of an hour. So look just so that I said it and I want you guys to see it also we put it in here. I haven't put no tint. I'm not protecting the wings or nothing right. None of the wing tips. We put it in close it up and we set a timer for an hour. This is what we're going to do. We're going to set one for 30 minutes because we want to keep our eye on it. Just to make sure it's not browning, you know, uncontrollably. Okay, so let's take a look at it right now. Look, my timer just went off and it's an hour, right? I'm going to grab, I got a toothpick. All right, so let's go ahead and check these before I check anything else. My potatoes, they're a little bit on the big side. They can use a little bit more time. And I got a little bit of a trick for you. Let me pull this out. I hate to keep pulling this out, you know, you're letting all your heat out and all of that, but you see how they're starting to... I accidentally split it when I was putting the butter under there, just checking there. Oh, they almost ready. If I bring the camera around here, look, it gets a little dark right here. What I'm going to do is I got a piece of foil and we're going to add this over the top. Now everybody knows, and if you didn't know, I'm going to tell you right now, when the chicken breast is at 165, it's time to take it out, right? But we want to go ahead and get it that way. And the only way we're going to know where we at is, let me get my I can tell when it goes in, not quite, but right now we're at, look, 136. Got a little ways to go. I at least wanted to pick up another, you know, I'm gonna say another 30 degrees, but because we brining this, don't forget, it's gonna be very forgiving, right? So we just add this like that. I'm gonna push this back in here, and to be honest with you, I'm gonna set a timer for another 30 minutes, and then when I take it out of here, it's gonna be like magic, folks. Then look, I got a little bit of a heads up. Now you guys, if you've been with me, you know when we started this vlog feast, right? We started out making chicken stock. Now we got a little bit of chicken stock right here. Now this is that good stuff not to store a box, right? So check this out. I'm gonna add some of this to it and I'm gonna actually pour this over the top. It's almost like we're gonna do like a little bit of a base but this a mix with everything else that's inside of here, right? It's okay if it gets all over the potatoes and all of that but don't trip. That's gonna help me with my gravy, right? So it just adds more flavor to it. Let's push this back in here like this. Let's cover it up, put that tint on there, and I'll see you guys in 30 minutes. Okay. So my timer just went off. I don't need to take a look. I did go ahead and pull those off. You know what I mean? Let them just cook a little bit more, but you see how we got a little brown detail. I would like to get a little bit more brown in here, but I don't want to overcook my breast, right? I told you it's real forgiving though, because we brined it. Now I'm going to let this stay in there for about five minutes. I'm going to check my temp and then we're going to take this out. We didn't have time for it to relax. You know what I mean? It has rested. We brined, we put it in the oven. We got it all nice and roasted. I sure hate that it kind of like But that's me being heavy handed, right? So I got my knife, this is gonna be my slicer. All you guys gonna see this for a minute. Oh, when I talk about tender, look at that right there. I'm just going in here. Now I'm just gonna go ahead and make a cut, right? We just wanna cut it. Okay folks, look, now check this out. I'm gonna go ahead and just grab this like this. You wanna know if it's moist? You can see it's moist. Right there, I can just see it. This is what brine can do. And don't forget, I didn't do anything but cut the white meat, right? So this is breast. And when your breast pulled like this and it coming loose, talk to me, folks. If you have never, ever brined, look at this. Look, let me just put it like this. If you've never brined before, I'm just going to say hello and welcome to the club. Guess what, folks? Cheers. This right here is fire, folks. I'm, you know, just keeping it 100 with you. You know what I mean? It's really, this wasn't really about, I guess it really wasn't about like, you know, how to cook it, even though I threw that in there and that's the way I cook mine, but it's really about brining. If you guys don't know, you've got to take the time to try it. And listen, I'm doing this series. You all know that, right? It started yesterday. You know what I mean? It's called AB's Vlog Feast, right? I'm going to be posting every day. I know that's going to be grueling, but I'm going to try to make everybody's favorite, At least one or two of your dishes, right? And if you're looking for something new, you know, check me out. Look, I'm gonna even do some bacon. You know what I mean? So we're gonna have some sweet sauce on. I just wanna let you know, listen, I'm doing it. It's going down. And if you knew, let me just take your time to say, hey, thank you for watching this video. Don't forget to like, smash that subscribe button and tell everybody out there. There's a channel out here that's simplifying these recipes and taking the mystery out of cooking. And you wanna know what I'm really gonna do with these slices right here? I'm finna go in my pantry, grab that bread. Give me some mayo, and I'm finna do it old school, folks. Let's have some chicken sandwiches. I'm out. Peace. I almost forgot. Check this out. Look down here. You can see it's all gone. What we did was we just broke it down, divided it up into those, you know, here with me, right? You can see this is the one I'm taking home. But I just want to tell you guys this. If you look down here, don't forget all them juices. And we pour some chicken stock in there to go along with everything that sweated out of that. And this right here, I'm going to strain it back just a little bit to get some of these bigger pieces out of there. Get the garlic and a couple other little pieces in here. And we We finna make a gravy, folks. Stay with me, AB's Vlog Feast. If you go to my channel, it'll be at the top, right? We're going to start dropping them like this every day till the end of the month. I'm out. Again, peace.