The Ultimate Guide to Perfect Chicken Breast

If you only season your chicken breast after cooking and not before, it will never truly taste that good. The outside of the breast may taste fine, but the inside will be bland, and perhaps even dry and leathery too.

The key to making delicious and moist chicken breast is simple: season the chicken well in advance with plenty of salt.

Here are two identical chicken breasts cooked for the same time.

On the left, an unseasoned breast (FYI — by “seasoned” I mean cooked with salt. If something is “unseasoned” it means no salt has been added at any point during the cooking process).

On the right, a breast that I seasoned two hours in advance.

The results are clear: a breast that’s been salted in advance (i.e. before cooking), like the one on the right, will almost always be more juicy and flavourful than one that hasn’t.

But there are a few different ways you can actually season a chicken breast (or any meat, for that matter), and some methods are more effective than others.

In this post, we’ll explore three different ways to season your chicken breast so that you never have to eat dry and leathery chicken breast again.

But before we do that, we need to understand why salt is so important.

How salt improves the taste of food

Let’s start with taste. No matter when you season your chicken breast, salted chicken breast will almost always taste better than one without salt.

Salt does a lot more for food than add a “salty” flavour. For example, salt minimises bitterness, enhances aromas, and balances sweetness.

But most importantly, salt enhances and deepens the flavour of food. In the words of Samin Nosrat: “salt has a greater impact on flavour than any other ingredient.”

When you add salt to your food, the goal is not to make the food taste salty — the goal is to make the food taste more like itself.

When you properly season a chicken breast, the meat won’t taste salty. Instead, it’ll simply taste more like chicken. The flavour will be enhanced and deepened.

How to properly season chicken breast (and any other meat)

Of course, salt only affects the part of the meat that it actually touches (and therefore seasons). When you season the outside of the meat after you’ve cooked it, the inside is still salt-free. That means, although the outside tastes more intense and, um, “chicken-y”, the inside will probably still taste pretty bland.

But this problem can be solved.

In general, when you season meat, the salt slowly penetrates the meat and evenly distributes itself throughout it. That’s why you need to season the meat well in advance to give the salt enough time to do its thing.

A well-seasoned piece of meat implies that the salt has had ample time to evenly distribute itself throughout the entire cut.

Salt helps stop chicken breast (and all other meat) drying out

But deepening the flavour of food isn’t the only thing that salt can do. It has another benefit for meat.

As anyone who’s ever eaten some of my parents’ home-cooked chicken is well aware, it doesn’t take much to end up with dry chicken breast. You’ve got to be very careful when cooking chicken breast to make sure it doesn’t dry out.

This is the other place where salt helps. In general, meat usually loses around 30% of its liquid when it’s cooked.

Salt helps meat hang onto some of that liquid. When you cook a properly seasoned chicken breast, for example, it’ll lose a lot less liquid than a non-seasoned breast. That means you’ve got a much more juicy and much more flavourful breast.

In practice, this means that you’ve got a much larger margin for error for overcooking. Salt enables the chicken to be cooked for an extended duration without becoming dry

Remember that comparison from earlier? These breasts have been cooked for the exact same time at the exact same temperature. The only reason that one on the right is more juicy is salt.

But please bear in mind, salt isn’t a miracle ingredient. It might mean you can get away with an extra five or ten minutes when you’re cooking the breast. But if you cook it for too long, the breast will still eventually dry out.

And by the way, everything I’ve talked about here doesn’t just apply to chicken breast. It applies to all meat, all fish, and even vegetables.

Okay, so to wrap up, salting your chicken breast in advance amplifies its flavour and keeps the breast moist. But how do you actually salt the chicken breast in practice?

Well, in my opinion, there are three decent options.

How to brine your chicken breast (and all other meat)

The first is brining. A brine is actually a pretty basic concept. It literally just means salted water.

Add some salt to a bowl of water, and you have a brine. You can also add herbs, spices, aromatics, or whatever. But these are completely optional.

In terms of how much salt to add to your brine, it isn’t really an exact science. You’ll often hear people refer to a brine as a percentage.

A 7% brine, for example, refers to what percentage of the water’s weight is salt.

For a 7% brine, that would mean a brine that is 7% salt by weight. So if you have 1kg water, a 7% brine would mean 70g salt. Depending on the type of meat, a brine is generally between 5% to 15% salt by weight. For chicken breasts specifically, I use a 6% brine. (Again, this isn’t an exact science, so feel free to play around with the numbers).

To do that, add some chicken breast to a container, set the container on a scale, and then turn the scale on. At this point, it should be at zero grams.

Fill the container with water until the chicken breast is fully submerged, and then add that back to the scale. Whatever weight on your scale now, that’s your reference point. Mine’s about 300g here.

That means I need to add 18 grams of salt to make a 6% brine. So I’ll remove the chicken breast, add the salt to the water, and stir it so that the salt is evenly distributed. Then I’ll add the chicken breast back and leave the brine to work.

In terms of how long to leave the brine, the most common recommendation that I’ve seen says to leave the meat for about an hour for every 1lb (454g) of meat. For this breast, which is only 100g, that’s about 15 minutes. We really don’t want the chicken to absorb all the salt in the water, so I really wouldn’t leave the chicken for much longer than that, or it could end up too salty.

After 15 minutes, I removed the chicken breast from the brine. I then roasted it for 15 minutes at 190 degrees Celsius until it was 63 degrees Celsius inside, on an instant thermometer. I then let the meat rest for about 5 minutes.

As you can see, that’s a very, very juicy breast, and it has a very juicy texture too.

But it doesn’t actually taste all that fantastic. The fact is, as the chicken breast absorbs the salt from the brine, it also absorbs loads of the water itself, and that’s just regular boring water.

The brined breast is juicy simply because it’s filled up with this extra water. But this extra water has no flavour.

So how can we season the breast without adding loads of extra plain water?

How to dry-brine your chicken breast (and all other meat)

Thankfully, there’s another technique that we can use to achieve all the same things as the brine, but which doesn’t lead to a chicken breast bloated with tap water. And that technique is the dry brine.

The principles of the dry brine are all the same as the normal brine, but as the name implies, it doesn’t involve any water.

Instead, you add the salt to the chicken breast directly and then just leave the salt to do its thing. The chicken slowly absorbs the salt and seasons itself.

Just like with brining, the amount of salt you use isn’t an exact science. But you absolutely need to use a lot less salt than you would with a brine.

Unlike the regular brine, all the salt we use in the dry brine will ultimately get absorbed by the chicken breast, which means it’ll get eaten with the breast too. If we use the same amount of salt in the dry brine as we use in the regular brine, the breast would be way too salty.

But therein lies the first benefit of the dry brine: it’s a lot less wasteful. You need to use a lot less salt, and you don’t need to use any water.

But that doesn’t actually answer the question: how much salt should you actually use? To be honest, I just eyeball it and make sure the entire breast is covered with salt. For a 100g breast, I ended up using about 5g salt.

I’m just easing the salt over it and making sure it’s covered on both sides. Then I’m just leaving it to sit there and let the salt do its thing. In this time, I don’t need to set any timers or anything.

Another benefit of the dry brine is that, unlike a regular brine, you can’t actually over-brine the breast. You can leave the chicken to sit there for as long as you like.

The salt content remains consistent, whether you cook it in 30 minutes or in two days. But for the dry brine, I’d recommend at least an hour for every 1lb (454g) of meat. I’ve left this breast for an hour.

First, I’m discarding the excess water that it’s released, and then I’m cooking it just as I cooked the previous breasts — 180 degrees Celsius until it’s 63 degrees inside. That’s another 15 minutes or so.

And as you can see, it’s more juicy than the unsalted breast but it isn’t quite as juicy as the brined breast. But what it lacks for in moisture, it more than makes up for in flavour.

It has a much more concentrated and notable flavour than the brined version. After all, that extra moisture that the brined version had was just plain tap water. This is pure chicken flavour.

But if you do feel like you want that extra moisture, you might wonder, what about marinating the chicken?

How to marinate your chicken beast (and all other meat)

Marinating the chicken does sound like a good idea on paper. You’d get the seasoning from the salt and the nice flavours of the marinade. But in practice, it isn’t quite as simple as that.

Like a brine, a marinade is time-sensitive. In fact, it’s much more time-sensitive.

Marinades generally use acidic ingredients like lemon juice, yoghurt, or vinegar. And acidic ingredients actually cook the meat.

When you cook meat with heat, one of the things you’re actually doing is denaturing the proteins. With chicken specifically, it’s this denaturing process that turns the meat from pink to white.

Acidic ingredients do that exact same thing. Just like heat, lemon juice, vinegar, and yogurt will also denature meat proteins if left for long enough.

But in my experience, if you leave the meat to marinate too long in these acidic ingredients, the marinade will ruin the texture of the meat and turn it mushy and chewy.

The problem is that in the time it takes for the salt to properly do its work, the marinade will have been left for too long.

I found that 30 minutes is an absolute maximum time to leave an “average-sized” (say, 300g) chicken breast marinating in an acidic marinade.

However, in most cases, this isn’t long enough for a thorough dry brine. 30 minutes just isn’t long enough for the salt to properly season the meat.

That means your best bet if you want to marinate your chicken is to dry brine the chicken first and then marinate it. (And it’s also important that the marinade is salt-free. Otherwise, the meat will be way too salty).

To do that, I’ve got another piece of chicken breast here that I’ve already dry brined and left for 30 minutes.

I’m making a basic marinade of three parts vegetable oil, one part lemon juice, and some minced coriander and garlic.

I’ve left that marinade to work for 30 minutes, and then I’m cooking the chicken breast just like I did the other two, 180 degrees Celsius until it’s 63 degrees inside.

For whatever reason, the marinated breast took a little longer to cook than the other two. It took about 20 minutes instead of 15.

So there you have it: three options for cooking your chicken breast.

How to get perfect chicken breast?

Which option should you choose? For me, it’s a no-brainer.

The dry brine wins out over the regular brine every time. It’s easier, it’s less wasteful, there’s less chance of mistakes, and it leads to more tasty, albeit somewhat less juicy, chicken.

I’ll probably still marinate my chicken in the future too, but if I do that, then I’ll absolutely dry brine it first and then add a saltless marinade afterwards.

In any case, the main takeaway is this: you should be seasoning your meat, regardless. A salted chicken breast is always going to have more flavour than a non-salted one, no matter how it’s salted.

But if you want the absolute best flavour, you should season the chicken breast in advance so that the salt has time to work its way through the meat. It doesn’t matter if it’s brined, dry brined, or marinated. Any of these approaches will lead to chicken breast that almost always tastes better than unseasoned chicken.