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Ever since I touched a cooking apparatus, I had never cook chicken breast to perfection. Not even once. Most of the time I had to end up shredding the chicken and spam it with sauce to pretend it was meant to be chicken mayonnaise or shredded chicken noodles. Pathetic. Last night there was a breakthrough. It wasn't perfect yet and I believe I can improve it further. Nonetheless, a night to mark and celebrate.
That was important because it was basically one of the two meats I would allow myself to eat sparingly, the other one being fish. We all know about the breast being the 'healthiest' part of a chicken. Least fats, low calorie, high protein gram for gram as compared to other parts of the chicken. That's the lesser evil. Evil, because these days you would not know how the chicken on your table was brought up and fed. Perhaps if you are in tip top health, you can put that paranoia at the end of your mind. We all trust our food authorities such as AVA to ensure all food in the market are safe for consumption yeah?
So if we have to consume bad meat, the favour we can do for ourselves would be eating the healthiest cut cooked in a modest way. The other end of this would be enjoying that fried chicken drum or thigh with a thick layer of yellow fat under the skin. KFC you know, yum. Eat that with plenty of sauce too. I wonder why we did that, as if that fried chicken wasn't delicious enough already. Who cares about rationality when it comes to fried chicken anyway? No one.
I am salivating already but let's get back to breasts business. Trust me, if you haven't tried cooking chicken breasts chunks yourself already, it is the hardest cut to cook well. When I meant well, I meant delicious, at least delicious enough to compensate giving up KFC fried chicken ok? So when I finally managed to produce delicate, moist, juicy chicken breasts meat last night, it warmed my heart in the cold Autumn night. I was sure Jen was impressed too.
Are you guys Masters of the Breasts already? Or you are a member of the Tough and Pathetic club? Do you want to cook that damn thing well too? Let me share with you the hard truths. There are tons of recipes on the internet! - that don't work. Apparently you can achieve drop dead gorgeous breasts by any cooking methods known to man. Poach, steam, boil, pan fried, oven baked, fried, stew, bbq, smoke, you name it! The problem about cooking chicken breasts perfectly is that the margin for error is very slim. 1 min, no, 30 seconds of overcooking can ruin it. 5mm of extra thickness in your chunk will not work out. Your cooking medium matters. The thickness of the medium. The tightness of your lid matters. Your flame matters. The 'high heat' as recommended on internet recipes may not be as high as your high.
I am not a talented cook, that explains why I failed umpteen times in cooking something as simple as this. There seemed only one way out for me, using the muscle memory to do this instead of following steps. The way we learn the bicycle. If we have to refer to the steps for different levels of gradient we are cycling through, we'll be in deep trouble. This works for me, using judgement rather than following steps. Thus it allows me to do a proper job with chicken of different shapes, sizes and thickness using different types of cookware.