It’s the start of a weekly series! My goal here on the site is to grill something every week and post about it. Hopefully I’ll find new recipes, learn new techniques, and pass on some tips I pick up along the way.
For this inaugural episode, I made chicken gyros with a homemade tzatziki sauce. I found this recipe over on Reddit’s /r/eatcheapandhealthy. I didn’t track costs or calories, so I can’t really verify the claims of cheapness or healthiness, but it seems decent on both accounts.
Prepping the tzatziki was quick and simple, with the added bonus of the strange sensation of grating a cucumber, then squeezing the excess water out. For the chicken, I hit the grill.
I took one large boneless, skinless chicken breast (out of a bag of frozen breasts from Costco), and placed it in a gallon-size Ziploc freezer bag along with the marinade ingredients. For easier grilling, I usually take a meat tenderizer, and with the smooth side, I pound the chicken breast in the bag. The goal is to make the breast flatter, and close to a consistent thickness throughout. If you have thicker portions of the meat, they’ll cook slower than the thin parts. This is a good way to make your meat dry in the thinner parts, and just cooked (or undercooked) in the thicker part. I flattened this one out to about 3/4 of an inch, though I probably could have gone thinner than that.
This was a quick weeknight meal, so I fired up the gas grill. I generally prefer to use my Weber kettle, but I picked up a cheap gas grill last fall for the versatility. I figured if I like the gas option, I can always upgrade to something better eventually.
My typical process for chicken is to grill about 3-4 minutes, then rotate the breast 45 degrees and grill another 3-4 minutes in an attempt to get those nice grill marks. Then I flip and do the same on the other side. I wasn’t patient enough to let the grill preheat long enough tonight – the grates need to be pretty hot to make sear marks.
You might be able to see I’ve got flatbreads warming on the top shelf of the grill. In lieu of the pitas the recipe called for, I pulled out some naan bread we had in the freezer (from a large package… also from Costco). Those only took about 8 minutes or so before they were thawed, warm, and not charred.
Anyway, after the chicken had been on about 15 minutes, I checked the meat temperature. I was shooting for the recommended 165, but was still a little under, so I kept it on, continuing to flip every few minutes until I reached my desired temperature. I think in total it took around 20 minutes. It probably could have been done more quickly if it had been thinner, but that’s ok.
The chicken ended up reasonably juicy, though maybe a little drier in the thinner parts. Next time I’ll try to make the thickness a little more uniform. The gyros were tasty! I didn’t take a picture of the finished product, so you’ll have to follow my earlier recipe link to see somebody else’s (much better) photos. You can just assume that mine definitely looked as good.
Well, this has been a rundown of my current method for grilled chicken. I’m still working on fine-tuning the process, but I’m getting better at it. I think nailing the thickness of the meat and checking the temperature are the biggest keys for me right now. Chicken gets dry quickly, so pulling it off once it hits 165 (or earlier… if you like to live dangerously) is important.
Beer of the week: A classic, Revolution’s Anti-Hero.
See you next time for another edition of GOTW!