GRILLED BREASTS & CUTLETS

BONE-IN, SKIN-ON BREASTS AND BONELESS, skinless cutlets can both be grilled, but each requires its own methods for flavoring and cooking.

GRILLED BREASTS

Grilled chicken breasts should have richly caramelized, golden brown (not burnt) skin and moist, juicy meat. With very little fat, breasts have a tendency to dry out. The fact that many bone-in breasts can be more than an inch thick doesn't help. The skin can char and the exterior layers of meat can dry out by the time the meat near the bone is cooked through.

We divided our tests on grilled chicken breasts into three sets. The first involved partial cooking off the grill; the second involved particular ways of moving the chicken around on the grill surface, as well as use of the grill cover for part of the cooking time; and the third involved various ways of treating the chicken before cooking it, both to add flavor and to improve texture.

We had thought that some of the methods of partially cooking the chicken off the grill would work pretty well, but we were wrong. Poaching the chicken before grilling resulted in dry chicken with a cottony texture. Microwaving prior to grilling was even worse: The chicken ended up not only dry but rubbery, and the skin failed to crisp despite its postmicrowave time on the grill.

Our next approach was to sear the breasts on the grill first, then finish the cooking off the grill. Using the microwave to finish cooking after a five-minute sear on the grill wasn't bad, and it is acceptable for those times when you're in a hurry to get food on the table. Unlike the chicken that was microwaved before being grilled, these pieces had crispy skin, and the meat was evenly cooked throughout. But the meat was also slightly less juicy than that cooked entirely on the grill.

Our final attempt at combined cooking methods came even closer to the goal. Again we seared the breasts on the grill but this time finished cooking them in a 350-degree oven. The meat was evenly cooked and remained juicy, with none of the toughness experienced with other combined cooking methods; the skin, which had crisped up nicely during its time on the grill, remained quite crisp after its sojourn in the oven.

The differences between this method and our final favorite were differences of degree. The meat was just slightly less tender, the skin a bit less crispy. More important, this oven method used two different appliances and required you to do part of the cooking outside on the grill and the rest in the kitchen. Not only was this needlessly cumbersome, it was also less fun, given that part of the appeal of grilling is standing around the fire while sipping your favorite beverage and passing the time of day as you cook. So we consigned this method to the reject pile along with the other, less successful combination cooking techniques.

We next moved on to test methods that involved cooking on the grill alone. Each involved some variation on a two-level fire, that is, a fire in which one area of the grill is hotter than the other. The idea in every case was to get the sear from the hotter fire and cook the chicken evenly all the way through over the cooler part of the grill.

The first of these methods seemed particularly contrary, but a friend had insisted that it worked, so we gave it a test run. In this method, the chicken was cooked on a low fire first, then finished up on a hot fire. Like microwaving, however, this backward approach resulted in dry meat—a lame result for a method that saved no time or energy.

Next we tried the method that intuitively seemed most likely to succeed: searing the chicken breasts over the coals and then moving them to a cool part of the grill to finish cooking. The breasts refused to cook through to the bone in less than half an hour. By this time the skin was burning and the outer layers of meat were dry. We tried using the grill cover but detected some off flavors from the burned-on ashes that had built up on the inside of the cover. (This ash buildup is a common problem with charcoal grilling but not gas grilling, in which the fire burns much more cleanly.)

We did notice, however, that cooking with the cover cut the grilling time back to 20 minutes. Less time over the flames meant the skin was not black and the meat was still juicy. We decided to improvise a cover by using a disposable aluminum roasting pan (an old restaurant trick) to build up heat around the breasts and help speed along the cooking. After searing for five minutes, we moved the breasts to a cooler part of the fire, covered them with a disposable pan, and continued grilling for another 15 minutes or so. This allowed the breasts to cook through without burning.

It was now time to consider ways of adding flavor to the chicken. Options included marinades, spice rubs and pastes, barbecue sauces, salsas, and brining.

Marinating the chicken was disappointing. Even several hours in a classic oil-and-acid marinade added only a small amount of flavor to the finished chicken, and oil dripping off the marinated chicken caused constant flare-ups during the initial searing period.

Rubbing the chicken with a spice rub prior to grilling proved far more satisfactory. Because rubs and pastes are composed almost entirely of spices, they have enough flavor intensity to stand up to the smoky grilled flavor of the meat. Barbecue sauces often contain some sweetener and can burn if brushed on the chicken before cooking. We found it best to brush them on when cooking was almost done, serving extra sauce at the table, if desired. You can also skip flavoring the chicken with a rub or sauce and instead serve it with a salsa or chutney.

As a final test, we tried brining the chicken before grilling it. We tried brining for various amounts of time and found that by using a brine with a high concentration of salt and sugar, we could achieve the result we wanted in only 1¹/₂ hours. The brine penetrated the chicken to the bone, seasoning it and helping to firm up its texture before grilling.