If you want to give your chicken flavour, nothing beats a spicy marinated chicken. Many recipes will give you the ingredients and how these should be mixed, but not many will tell you how to get the best flavour out of your chicken marinades. This guide aims to show you just that. By following some simple steps, you will have cooked chicken that is succulent and bursting with flavour.
Let's marinate a chicken!
- Make your marinade of choice. To get good flavour into a chicken, you will typically need one that contains ingredients like lime/ lemon juice, garlic, wine, olive oil, yoghurt, spices and herbs. Not all marinades will have every one of these ingredients, but this gives a rough idea of what a suitable marinade will contain.
- Next, dry your chicken thoroughly.
- To get the flavour right into the bird's meat, you can use one of two methods. Syringing or using the under skin spooning method
- For syringing, you use a marinade injector to inject about half of the marinade into the legs, wings and breast of the chicken,
- For underskin spooning, slip your fingers under the skin of the chicken and gently dislodge it from the flesh of the bird. Take care not puncture the skin as you want it to act almost like a pouch for the marinade. Now take a fork, slip it into under skin, and make holes in the flesh ( carefully, without damaging the skin). Finally, use a spoon to pour in two-thirds of the marinade. Now work it around to make contact with as much of the meat as you can get. (This is normally quite easy to do)
- After completing the first step in both instances, take the remaining marinade and pour it into a large resealable bag with a ziplock. Place the chicken in the bag and seal. Using your hands, work the marinade around the body of the chicken.
- Place the sealed bag with the chicken into a container ( To prevent a mess if there is a leakage ) and put it in the fridge for at least 24 hours. It will benefit from being turned in every 3 to 4 hours.
- You are now ready to start cooking or barbequing some fantastic spicy marinated chicken.