Easter Chicken 101

With Easter around the corner, here are a few tips on achieving fantastic results with your birds. The traditional way of treating chicken in most homes is first to boil for several minutes and fry. By doing this, one has simply succeeded in over cooking the chicken. I will be sharing a few tips you can use in preparing that wonderful, mouth-watering and juicy Easter chicken your family would truly enjoy.

First thing you want to do is to understand the kind of bird you have. Is it soft or hard chicken, whole turkey/chicken or duck? The cooking time for these birds varies because of their different textures.

With that out of the way, the next important step is to brine your bird. With brining, you can never go wrong. It makes your chicken really juicy, tender and gives it a great taste. It is a great way of seasoning your chicken uniformly and can either be used for chicken parts or whole chicken.

Here is my brining process. Feel free to use it or you can modify and come up with yours. Pour some water into a pot.  Make sure the volume of water is enough to fully submerge the chicken you want to brine. Place the water on your burner. As soon as the water starts getting warm, add equal quantity of salt and brown sugar (3/4 cup full should do), smashed garlic, squeeze some lemon juice into it and also throw what is left of the lemon into the pot, cut an onion into 2 halves and add to it. Also add bay leaves. Stir and put out the flame and allow the temperature of the mixture to drop. Make sure the temperature of your brine mixture has totally dropped before you submerge your chicken (It should not even be warm). Placing your pot in a bowl containing ice can help speed up this process.

Submerge your chicken in the brine mixture and keep the brining chicken in your fridge for 2hours if you are brining chicken parts and 6 hours if it is a whole chicken.

Then bring out your chicken from the brine, pat dry with paper towels, give the chicken a good dry rub (dry red pepper, powdered ginger, freshly ground black pepper, paprika  and seasoning) and  deep fry/grill/oven bake to get that great tasting chicken for the family during Easter.

Happy Easter everyone!