Chicken on the Grill: 100 Surefire Ways to Grill Perfect Chicken Every Time

By Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison

The aroma should be irresistible. The outside should be crisp, the inside juicy. We're talking about one of America's most popular foods -- grilled chicken. But how many times does the outside look perfect while the inside is perfectly raw? Or you're simply left with a smoldering, charred mess?

Award-winning cookbook authors and America's outdoor grilling experts, Cheryl and Bill Jamison come to the rescue in Chicken on the Grill.

The Jamisons identify the most common mistakes in grilling chicken and, most important, teach you how to correct them. Learn how to tend to the fire, how to time the grilling process, and how to check for doneness. Their advice and expertise make it easy to enjoy perfectly tender, juicy chicken that is bursting with true flavor only grilling over a fire can impart.

With more than 50 color photographs throughout, Chicken on the Grill is as much a feast for the eyes as it is for the table. The 100-plus recipes include everything from classic Grill-Roasted Chicken and Grilled Chicken Caesar on a Skewer to exotic new dishes like Tequila-Lime Chicken Tacos with Charred Limes and Curried Chicken Roti. There are 50 inspiring ideas for boneless, skinless breasts, plus recipes for wings, sandwiches, and satays. Since man can't really live by chicken alone, there are recipes for sides and sweets such as Rockin' Guac, Grilled Asparagus with Orange Zest, and Frozen Margarita Pie.

Chicken is economical, rich in protein and nutrients, and can be prepared in a wide variety of ways to suit a wide variety of tastes. From everyday family meals to entertaining a crowd, you can't beat a great grilled chicken. And you can't beat Chicken on the Grill for showing you just how to do it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9780062039255

Cheryl Alters Jamison

Cheryl and Bill Jamison are the authors of more than a dozen cookbooks and travel guides. They appear regularly on television, and are frequent contributors to publications, including Cooking Light and Bon Appétit. They live just outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Book preview

No Burned Birds

Grilled chicken must be the most frequently botched food in America. We’ve all seen the sad results: chicken burned on the outside but still raw in the center, a breast dried to the texture of straw, bland meat seasoned with no more than a commercial barbecue sauce sauce, or, in more recent times, the poultry flavor obliterated by a blast of rude spice. Outdoor cooks haven’t neglected a single way to kill that innocent bird over and over again.

Properly grilled chicken is a delight, lightly browned and crusted on the surface, succulent and tender in the center. Seasoned well, it boasts broader appeal than any other backyard food. For an everyday family meal, chicken offers solid value, and it’s easy and relatively quick to grill when you know what you’re doing. It is also great for entertaining because everyone likes chicken and—unlike a lot of other foods—few people shun it for health or dietary reasons.

Perhaps most important to us, chicken can embrace an incredible range of complementary flavors. In the pages ahead, we’ll use the grill for Harissa Hot Wings, Tequila-Lime Chicken Tacos with Charred Limes, Chicken Pasta with Sage and Capocollo Sauce, and Chicken Breast Haystacks with Green Tomato Butter. We’ll also skewer them for rotisserie roasting, and even smoke one on top of a beer can. For times when you’re in a traveling mood, we’ll present ample opportunities to enjoy Italy one night, India the next, and then move on to Morocco, Mexico, the South of

France, and Southeast Asia, before returning home at the end of the week to American Barbecued Chicken Pizza. Nothing else you can grill offers such a full turf of tastes. If you’ve been keeping your chicken cooped up in a cubbyhole of flavors, it’s time to let that bird fly.

The Two Most Common Grilling Mistakes

Backyard cooks often assume that grilling chicken is a no-brainer. Most of us earned our stripes at the grill with hamburgers and hot dogs, which aren’t much tougher to make than peanut butter sandwiches. Chicken seems like an easy next step, but it’s actually more of a short leap. To land there on your feet, you have to hurdle the two most common mistakes in grilling.

The most prevalent problem, oddly, is a tendency to forget that we’re cooking. Intent on enjoying the outdoors, spending time with family and friends, and imbibing our favorite libation, we often neglect the basic correlates of all cooking, time and temperature. To cook anything well, you must apply a proper level of heat for an appropriate period of time. Too often in grilling, we don’t bother to measure and control the intensity of the fire, and we judge the cooking time on the basis of how long it takes to drink a beer.

That approach works to some extent with forgiving foods like burgers and dogs, but with chicken and other delicate or fine ingredients, it’s a recipe for disaster. We all understand this almost instinctively inside, working in our kitchens: no one would ever try to bake a chicken potpie by guessing about the oven temperature and then just letting it cook until they’re ready to eat. Outside, though, we want to play looser—but the same principles apply.

The second major mistake is to fail to recognize and then seek true grill taste. Every cooking method, from boiling to broiling, contributes its own distinctive characteristics to food. Perfectly fried chicken for example, presents a heady combination of crunchy skin and juicy interior, whilea slowly simmered special chicken soup preserves the individual integrity of the various ingredients as it tenderizes and harmonizes them.

The goal in grilling is to deepen the inherent flavor of food through the chemical process of high-heat browning (what scientists call the Maillard Reaction). With poultry, fish, and meat in particular, the browning and crisping of the exterior requires direct heat at the right temperature. The fire needs to be hot enough to shrink the muscle fibers on the surface, thereby concentrating the flavor, but not so hot that it burns or chars the outside before cooking the food through. When done well, the result is a robust amplification of the food’s natural flavor along with a tasty textural contrast between the crusted surface and the succulent interior. It’s an outcome distinctive to grilling, unlike anything obtained by any other cooking method except open-flame rotisserie roasting.

The only way to get that premier flavor is to fully cook all surface areas of poultry, fish, or meat over direct heat. The principle is simple, but it runs counter to the way that many Americans grill at home. To cook entirely with direct heat means keeping the grill open, just as chefs do in restaurant kitchens, rather than covered. When you lower the lid for cooking, as many American grill manufacturers recommend, you convert the grill to an oven and cook partially with the heat reflected off the cover. In effect, you are grilling and baking at the same time, a situation that remains unchanged even if you open the lid occasionally to turn the food and expose other areas to direct heat. The resulting flavor reflects the method, providing only a modicum of grilled texture along with a disappointing baked taste.

Using a cover does simplify the cooking process, particularly for inexperienced cooks, and that is the main reason manufacturers suggest it. You put the food in and leave it there until ready, just like in an oven, and you’re less likely to torch your vittles or your eyebrows. With an open grill, you must watch the food, cooking it one side at a time, turning it every few minutes, and moving it around as necessary to avoid flare-ups. You must also manage the temperature of the fire and keep track of timewell enough to gauge doneness. Some industry promoters say all that is just too difficult for an American backyard cook, though it’s how people grill at home everywhere else in the world. Personally, we like paying attention to the cooking, but even if we didn’t, the flavor trade-off would make the slight extra effort worthwhile.

Covered cooking on a grill does make sense in bad weather, or when you want to bake or roast food outside. Just because you’re using the grill in those situations, however, doesn’t mean that you’re grilling. To call all food cooked on a grill grilled, as some of the marketing professionals do, is somewhat akin to claiming that every dish prepared on a kitchen burner is stoved, regardless of whether the process is actually sautéing, deep-frying, or boiling. Most great baked chicken dishes—from the coq au vin of France to the King Ranch chicken of Texas—can be cooked in a baking dish in a covered grill if you wish, but you won’t be grilling. There’s no use of direct heat and no grill flavor. We stick with actual grilling in this book except in the chapter on whole chickens, which are too large to cook entirely with direct heat.

Grilling Chicken to Perfection

Grilling imparts a bona fide heartiness to chicken that poultry often lacks. It brings out the authentic natural flavor while crisping the skin or skinless surface in a way that highlights the internal tenderness and juiciness. Spice rubs, marinades, sauces, and relishes can add other special flavors to the chicken, but they shouldn’t distract from the distinctive grill taste.

Controlling the temperature of the fire is the main key to success. With the partial exception of thighs and drumsticks, chicken grills best over a steady moderate heat. The only effective way to gauge and then maintain that temperature is the time-honored hand test that people have used for eons in all forms of cooking. Place your hand a couple of inches above the top of the cooking grate and count the seconds until the heat of the fire forces you to pull away: one to two seconds meanshot, three seconds indicates medium high, and four to five seconds denotes moderate. You will seldom grill poultry, fish, or meat at lower temperatures, but some fruits and vegetables thrive at a range down to seven or eight seconds.

The hand test may sound a little primitive for our technological age, but it provides a more accurate and universal gauge of heat than any modern gadget made for a grill. The thermometers built into the hood of many grills today register only the heat inside when the cover is closed, not the true grilling temperature right above the fire. In open grilling, these gauges don’t measure anything. The temperature knobs on gas grills marked hot, medium, and low may provide more help over time, but not until you’ve determined the proper settings for your purposes since many cases, these calibrations refer to closed oven temperatures rather than grilling temperatures.

The hand test works equally well for charcoal and gas fires. Necessary temperature adjustments are, of course, simple on gas grills, but they are not much more difficult on charcoal models. For the moderate fire that you want for most chicken preparations, ignite just enough pieces of charcoal to result in single layer of coals under the cooking grate and allow them to burn down until they’re gray. Spread them evenly so that they still touch but don’t crowd one another. You can fine-tune the heat level by adding or removing coals, adjusting the vents, or moving the, the grate closer to the fire, depending on the design of your grill.

Chicken thighs and drumsticks grill best over a two-level fire, starting for a few minutes on high heat and then finishing on medium. On gas grills with three or more burners, you acan usually keep a hot fire and a medium fire going simultaneously from the beginning; on smaller models, you simply turn down the heat at the appropriate point. With charcoal grills, you establish two different cooking areas, one with coals in a single layer for moderate heat and another with coals piled two to three deep for a hot fire.

We grill at home with both gas and charcoal, and most of the time, we see little difference in the results. Some gas grills won’t get hotenough to properly sear steaks and other red meat, but they generally work fine with chicken. For us, the choice between the fuels is mainly a matter of mood. We choose gas for everyday grilling because of its speed and convenience, and we change to charcoal for entertaining to create a more casual, relaxed party atmosphere. If you only want one grill, pick the type that fits your personal style and budget.

Other Secrets of Success

Tending the fire, watching the food and the time, and cooking with direct heat—in an open grill these are the essentials of good grilling. If you get them right, you’re most of the way home to a fine meal. There are a few other tricks, though, that can make a big difference in how gracefully you arrive.

Grate Truths. Before you start grilling, always make sure that the cooking grate is clean, hot, and lightly oiled. Preheat the grate for 5 to 15 minutes with the cover down, getting it as hot as possible. Raise the cover and