Athletes in the Kitchen: How to Cook Chicken Ep 6

Cooking a whole chicken, I think, is also a great way to, you know, have a presentation of a meal. When you cook it, you know, if it's all slathered in herbs and golden brown skin, it looks like it just came off a rotisserie. Uh, that's always very visually appealing. And as we know, people eat with their eyes just as well as with their mouth.

Welcome to the Find Your Edge podcast. Get ready to dive into all things training, nutrition, recovery, and more. Whether you're a new or experienced endurance athlete, a weekend warrior, or someone who just wants to improve your health and fitness, this podcast is for you. I'm Chris Newport, founder, head coach, registered dietitian, exercise physiologist, and certified personal trainer with the Endurance Edge and the Fueling Edge. With more than 20 years experience in the fitness industry, 18 years in multi-sport, and over 10 years as a sports nutritionist, I'm speaking with athletes and experts about key actionable steps you can take to reach and sustain peak performance and health.

Let's do it. Welcome back to the Find Your Edge podcast for our monthly dose of athletes in the kitchen. So we are here with the Fueling Edge culinary development chef, John Kohler. Welcome back.

Thanks, Kris. Great to be here again.

Awesome. So today we are talking all about how to cook chicken. So before coming to this episode, I was Googling what, what are the most popular recipes, what were people cooking in the lockdown, what are people just generally wanting to eat more of, and chicken was one of them. So I figured may as well talk about it. So first, let's start with how to purchase. So what are we looking for in the grocery store when we're going for a good, a good piece of chicken?

I think that in the grocery store, one thing that I'm always very cognizant about is the expiration date or the sell-by date on any food, but especially on meats and proteins. That is something where I'm always picking through the entire case to make sure that I can get the ones that have the longest or the farthest out date from where we are in order to ensure that it's the freshest possible that I can get.

So you're one of those people that's like holding up the line 'cause you're digging through everything.

Absolutely. I hold up lines in grocery stores quite often. But I think that, you know, making sure that it looks right, that the package is sealed properly, definitely want to make sure that it doesn't have any sort of smells coming from that area. If there are, then I would just pass on it, get it a different day. But basically, you know, you're just looking for stuff that looks appealing. And if it looks good, then more than likely it's going to cook up just fine and taste good for you as well.

Cool. So when we're looking for, let's say maybe a whole chicken versus chicken breast, chicken thigh, like, briefly maybe a couple of different applications of why we should choose the whole chicken versus just the chicken breast or just the thigh?

Sure. I think that taking a whole chicken will obviously give you more options. If you're feeding more people, then you're going to have more meat and more of a finished product in order to serve them. Plus, some people like the dark meat, some people like the light meat. And I think that offering that option is always beneficial. Cooking a whole chicken, I think, is also a great way to have a presentation of a meal. When you cook it, if it's all slathered in herbs and golden brown skin, it looks like it just came off a rotisserie, that's always very visually appealing. And as we know, people eat with their eyes just as well as with their mouth.

Yeah. So, okay, you just mentioned something about slathered in wonderfulness. So if we take a whole chicken home, what's the best way to cook it in order to make it the most visually appealing? Because I know I've done it in the slow cooker. It's delicious. It's not very visually appealing. So how can we kind of have a little bit of both?

Right. I think that for me, cooking a whole chicken, what I want to do is always make sure I rub the inside and outside with either butter, or if I'm looking for something healthier, an olive oil or some other light vegetable oil and then season it. And I like to chop up a bunch of herbs and put them all over the chicken.

Okay, be specific.

Like, I really, I prefer thyme and parsley, maybe some oregano. If you are into rosemary and the more piney, then, you know, rosemary as well. It's more of a preference thing, a personal preference than anything. So with food, I'm always of the opinion that whatever you like is not wrong. So if someone wants a steak well done, I'll cook them a steak well done if that's how they want it because the customer's always right and however you want to eat it is right for you.

All right, so we got kind of like a shell for the whole chicken. Then what do we do with it? Are we roasting it at a certain temperature? Are we putting it on the grill?

I like to roast it in the oven, put it on a sheet pan and preferably on a rack that will keep it, the bottom off the sheet pan just a little bit. I start out at about 375, and if I have convection at home, I'll use convection. If not, I'll start out at about 400 and then roast it until I can get a temperature from the thigh of the chicken that's about 160 degrees. Once it gets to that point, I'll pull it out and I'll let it just rest on a counter for a good 15 to 20 minutes before slicing it. And what I really recommend everyone do is go out and get a decent digital thermometer and one that you can actually put into the chicken that's got a wire and it comes out of the oven. You can monitor the temperature closely the entire time. That's gonna be one secret to getting really juicy chicken is pulling it right at the perfect time. Because if you overcook it, obviously a lot of those juices and moisture are being evaporated into the air and you're losing that juiciness.

I know you mentioned temperature of the oven. What about a thermometer for your oven? How important is that with home ovens?

It's pretty important. I think a lot of people know the differences that their oven has between what it's telling you and what it is. I certainly do it at my house. My oven runs about 15 to 20 degrees hot. So I always account for that. However, if you're not sure, you know, for $4, you can go to a Target or a Walmart or someplace like that and get an oven thermometer, hang it in there, set your oven to 300 degrees and see how close it gets. And then you'll have a little bit of a gauge.

All right. In the wonderful world of COVID and recording things, I will have to say firstly, the first episode that we did, John, you and I, Athletes in the Kitchen, You had to drive to a Starbucks and sit in your car to get like more, like better Wi-Fi. So if you guys haven't listened to the first episode, you'll definitely have to tune into it now. Darren, our amazing producer, did pretty well with that audio. But, um, so hopefully you're getting better audio now, but, uh, we had to do a little brief pause because we had a little noise in the background, but we're, we're back in action now. So we just talked about how to cook a whole chicken in the oven, making sure we have a good meat thermometer and a good oven thermometer so you're familiar with the equipment that you have at home. And then making sure we let that chicken sit so it's nice and juicy. Should we— I'm assuming this might be a dumb question, but we cook it with the skin on, right?

Typically, yes. You're going to want to cook a whole bird with the skin on.

So what happens if we cook it with the skin off?

Well, first, it's it's a little difficult to get all the skin off and it's kind of time-consuming. But if you cook it with the skin off, you're going to get a drier chicken overall. The skin and the fat that's on the underneath of the skin does help hold up that moisture in. And if you don't want to eat the skin, it's always easier to pull it off at the end than take it off before you cook it.

And just from a health perspective, obviously taking the skin off is a little healthier, but if you can keep the moisture in, it's going to make it tastier. And of course, chicken is a good lean protein. So we're all about that. And Darren actually was asking about the differences between light and dark. Do you feel like they cook a lot differently? Absolutely. Light and dark meats, that is.

Absolutely, they do. The higher fat content of the dark meat is going to lend itself to a lot more leeway when you're cooking it. You can overcook chicken thigh quite a bit and it's actually still really tasty. Chicken breast, there's a very small window where if you overcook it, then you've got that dry chicken breast where you're taking it down with a full glass of water.

Yeah, and then throwing it into a chicken salad with like gobs of mayonnaise to revive it a little bit. And just so you guys know too, dark meat is actually a little bit higher in iron. Which is why the color is literally darker. And the fat content really isn't from like a dietary ingestion perspective, it's not all that much different. So, and a cost perspective, that's a big one too, thigh versus breast.

Absolutely, absolutely. Thigh is substantially cheaper than breast and it requires sometimes a little bit more work, but at the end of the day, I think that the applications that you can use the thigh for, such as braising and using it for tacos. And especially if you want to cook something, cook extra of it and then reheat it, the thigh works a lot better for that.

Okay, so let's jump in there. You had mentioned braising it. So this is one of your, what you had mentioned before we started recording, one of your favorite ways to have slow cooked chicken. Is this a weekend thing and how do we do it?

Well, it could be weekday, it could be weekend. I think it all depends on what equipment you have. If you have a slow cooker that you can set to start at a certain time, then it could be any day. However, if you are doing it on the stove or in a slow cooker or Instant Pot or something that you don't have the ability to set a timer on and walk away or leave, leave the house, then you're probably going to want to do it on the weekend or when you have about 3 or 4 hours of time to be in that area. So the way I like to do it, I really like slow cooked pulled breast for tacos and burritos, stuff like that. And so all I'll do is I'll take some breasts, clean them up, make sure that the bones are out of them, and if there's any of the little fat nodules kind of on the side where the, where the breasts connect, I'll take those off as well because those can get a little bit chewy. But then I'll just put them in my slow cooker, or I'll put them in a pot, add about maybe a cup of water, and then I about a half a bottle of whatever salsa I like. So maybe about a cup, cup and a half of that salsa. And then I like to put a couple dashes of hot sauce in there as well. Cover it, put it on high cook on my slow cooker, otherwise on a low heat on the stove, and let it go for about 3.5, 4 hours. And then after that's done, you can take it, easily shred it with a fork. This chicken stays moist because you're cooking it in the liquid. And it is amazing for tacos or for topping some sort of tostada, something like that. Really good.

Is this kid-friendly? Will your kids eat that?

My kids will eat this. They absolutely will. My kids devour it, and we probably have it at least twice a month just because they really enjoy it.

Yeah, and that's an easy and healthy one. I mean, that's insane easy.

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Wow.

It's just, you drop everything in the pot and just wait.

So if you have leftovers of that, is this freezable?

Absolutely. I have some in my freezer right now. I would say it would freeze for up to 6 months. The trick with freezing stuff is always to put it in a bag and get as much air out of that bag as possible. I also like to pre-portion it. So if I have a lot, say I'm doing a big recipe of this, or if I'm cooking, I really always like to have chili as well in my freezer. If I'm doing that, I like to portion it so I don't have to thaw the entire thing at once. I can thaw enough for a meal for 2 or a meal for 4 and then cook it and still have some left.

So I always find when you have eaten it, that you portion it, you put it in the fridge first and then in the freezer just to reduce freezer burn. Would you recommend that too, or do you think it matters?

I think it all depends on temperature. As long as the chicken or whatever you're freezing is at room temperature when you bag it, then getting all the air out and putting it directly in the freezer is fine. If it's warm, then I definitely want to put it into the refrigerator first in an open container, let it cool down to at least room temperature, if not below, then put it in the bag and get the air out and then freeze it.

So let's take a quick moment for food safety. Should we— can you talk about labeling?

Absolutely. Labeling is important from a number of standpoints. Number one, just to make sure that the food that you have, you know what it is. I have definitely fallen victim to putting things in my freezer, not having the time to label them or not taking the time to label them, I should say. And then 2 months later, I'm cleaning out my freezer and I don't know what it is.

What is this mysterious bag of things?

Mystery, mystery meat or mystery food. And they always inevitably end up in the trash because I don't know what they are. So labeling, you definitely want to, you know, put what it is on there and also put a cooked on date and a frozen date. Sometimes I'll make a big batch of something and I'll put it in my refrigerator thinking I'm going to have leftovers for a couple of days and be eating it over the next couple days, but it's been 4 days and I realized that I'm not going to eat it. So I'll put both the made on date as well as the frozen on date. And what that does is that gives me the amount of days that it's been in my refrigerator, because you basically have 5 to 7 days to eat anything in order to be health code compliant.

Right.

And that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't go over that. I think at home a lot of us do. However, that's a general rule of thumb, that 5 to 7 days. So if I cooked it on the 3rd and it's the 5th, then I know that it's already been in the refrigerator for 2 days. So once I defrost it, I've got 3 to 5 days before I need to eat it.

Yeah. How do you recommend that we write it? Like, are we getting a freezer bag and writing it with a Sharpie? Or I know in the kitchen we have like tape and we, you know.

I think whatever works for you, whatever's best for your system. I have a Sharpie and I usually write right on the bags in my home.

Yep. So how do you keep track of what's in your freezer?

Well, that's a great question.

Going through it on a regular basis or like?

Yeah, freezer cleanouts. You know, I find that every month or so I need to dump my ice bin because ice gets old and stale. And if you ever get down to the bottom of that ice bin because you've got, you know, guests over and you need to use a lot of ice and you're serving some of that ice, they can definitely taste it in their beverage or their cocktail. So I'm always dumping out my ice bin. And usually when I do that, I'll go through and I'll look at the stuff on the shelves as well and see if there's anything that is coming up on 3 to 6 months depending on what it is, and then either try and cook it or discard if it's, if it's over and it's been in there for too long.

Cool. All right. So we did some slow cooked chicken with a little salsa. Do you have a name for that?

I— it's just my—

John's salsa chicken?

Taco chicken. Yeah, that's usually what we use it for.

Cool. So what if we're on it? We're— it's a weeknight. We might want something under 30 minutes. Whether it's breast or thigh, any suggestions for us?

Absolutely. If you're going for weeknight, real easy, I think just taking a boneless skinless breast, seasoning it with salt and pepper and throwing it in the oven, 350 degrees, cooking it until it is 160 degrees on the inside. Then like I said earlier, you always wanna pull it and let it rest for a little while, 5 to 10 minutes for a breast. And then putting some sort of sauce on it or some sort of marinade. My kids like ranch chicken. That's, you know, a real kid-friendly thing. Just drizzling it with a little bit of ranch sauce. You could put some buffalo sauce on it, whatever you like really. Or it could just be plain salt and pepper chicken. I think another great one, if you have a little more time and want to expend a little more energy, is to use some sort of barbecue seasoning or mesquite seasoning. You could do that on either breast or thigh, throw it on the grill, get it nice and kind of charred on the outside, but still keeping it nice and moist on the inside. And then serving that with some sort of side items, some slaw or, you know, some other nice vegetables that can always be thrown on the grill as well.

Cool. So we talked about a way to potentially put it on the grill, in the oven. What if we want to do stovetop?

So stovetop is great and it's a little bit more, labor-intensive because you do need to watch it, especially if it's breast. What I do on the stovetop is I will get my pan nice and hot, oil in it, and then sear both sides of the breast or the thigh. And then what I like to do is I like to cover it and almost steam the rest of it, and that gives me more control because if I'm cooking it at high temperature and that you know, one side is down and that high temperature is just hitting the bottom. It's not hitting the top of the chicken. It's going to only cook from one side up. So that skin or the outside of the muscle that you're cooking on that part of the chicken is gonna get overdone while the heat is distributing through the chicken. So I typically avoid cooking breasts on the stovetop from start to finish. If I do sear them like that, then I'll throw them in the oven at, again, at 350 and let them finish up in there.

Okay, cool. All right. So what about troubleshooting? So I know I have certainly encountered multiple times where I put chicken in the pan and then it's stuck. What did I do wrong? Is my temp— is my pan temperature off? Did I not like— should I pat the chicken dry first? So it's not as— so there's not as much moisture.

I think that in that case, two things. One, the pan could have been a little bit hotter and making sure that when you do cook in a pan that you're using some sort of fat oil in the pan. I prefer either like a grapeseed or an avocado oil. Those don't get the bitter flavor that olive oil gets when you do use really high heat. And then you also just, it's more time. It needs more time on that side because it will naturally release once it's had enough time on that side.

Science. Science, we love science.

Absolutely.

All right, so what about some tricks for cooking in bulk and then like repurposing already cooked chicken in maybe like different permutations throughout the week. But let's say we like cook a bunch in the oven like you've suggested on say like, I don't know, a Sunday or Saturday, and then we want to kind of not have the same thing every week or every weekday.

Absolutely. I think that for that, uh, what you can do is you can, you can take your chicken, divide it up into, into the nights, and then basically store it. Every day you pull out your chicken that you're going to use for that, that particular day or evening. And, you know, one night you could just slice it up and use it on, on top of a salad. The next night you could dice it up and toss it with some sort of barbecue sauce and make a barbecue chicken quesadilla. You know, it's really whatever you prefer, but Once it's cooked, you can add any sauces that you want. You can add seasonings if you like, or like I mentioned, you know, just throw it on top of a salad and that's always a really great healthy meal as well.

All right. So we got salads, we got maybe some ranch chicken, maybe some barbecue chicken. We had some like chicken with some herbs before. How about some recipe remixes? So there's some chicken piccata is one that a lot of people search for. How can we maybe, well, what's the original recipe and maybe how can we like make it just a little healthier?

Okay, absolutely. So chicken piccata, what you're going to have is very thinly sliced breast and you dredge it in flour, seasoned flour, and then you fry it in the pan, getting both sides, you know, nice and golden brown with that flour on there. And then once the chicken's out of the pan, you use that pan to make your piccata sauce, which typically is gonna be lemon juice, maybe some white wine, butter, and then you add your capers and other seasoning, salt and pepper, anything else that you like. So for that, what I would do is I would, number one, try and cut the amount of butter that's in it. That's going to make a big difference. But number two is you can reduce the white wine and the lemon juice and then add a little bit of cornstarch that's been diluted in water, and that will help that thicken up. It's not gonna taste exactly the same because it's not gonna have that fat content, but it will have the nice lemon white wine flavor. And then you can put your chicken back into that and let it come in through the, in through and season the chicken and the flour that's on the outside of the chicken. And that will give you a very similar flavor, a little bit different mouthfeel with the lack of fat, but it should be really, Really tasty.

Yeah. What about— I know you mentioned flour, so we have quite a few people who are either gluten sensitive or celiac. Any suggestions what replacement we could use for flour that's gluten-free?

Absolutely. At the Fueling Edge, we use a lot of oat flour. That works really well. At home, I use a lot of rice flour. That's a flour that I really like.

Do you care brown rice flour versus white rice flour?

I think using the brown rice is always preferable. The only cases where I do use white rices are if I'm making sushi, I'll use, you know, obviously the short grain white rice. And then in Persian dishes that if I want to make them authentic, I'm using more of a white basmati.

Okay, cool. All right, so we kind of remixed piccata a little bit. Because we are potentially coming upon grilling season, is there anything we should do to our grill? Or to our chicken before we put it on the grill to make sure it either doesn't stick or that all the chicken kind of comes off roughly at the same time? Yeah, what shall we do there? Should we marinate it?

You know, you can cook it any way you like. I think a couple of things that I definitely do is number one, I know my grill and I know which spots are hotter, which spots are cooler. And there's always going to be a little bit of moving chicken or whatever you're cooking around on your grill in order to ensure that it cooks evenly. One big mistake that I see a lot of people make is they'll either scrape their grill while it's cold or they won't scrape it at all. You definitely want to get your grill nice and hot before you scrape it. And then I like to take a—

Is that because it's just like harder to scrape? That the heat just like loosens up all that extra gunk?

Absolutely, absolutely. It's harder to scrape. And when I'm doing that, I actually don't use a wire brush as well. Some of those wires can come out of that brush and remain on the grill.

Yeah.

And then if you throw your chicken on there, it might stick into the chicken. And I haven't had it happen, but I have definitely heard of people getting some of those wires in their mouth.

That's an unfortunate trip to the dentist.

They're pretty small and pretty sharp, so those could definitely hurt you.

So what do we use instead?

Um, there's wooden products, there's pumice products, and those, those work really well. You know, another thing that you can do is if you do use a wire brush afterwards, make sure you wipe it with a rag or a cloth. And then after that, you're going to put your oil on another cloth and oil your, uh, your surface. Or you can turn the flames off real quick, spray it all down with a pan coating spray, and then turn the flames back on, but you want to make sure it's nice and oiled up as well.

Yeah. So if we don't turn our grill off and we're spraying all that, are we going to lose our eyebrows? I would imagine.

You might lose your eyebrows or singe some of your knuckle hair.

Does not sound good. Okay. So heat on the grill. When it goes, when that chicken goes on the grill, should it be pretty hot?

Absolutely. I heat my grill up for 5 to 10 minutes. All the way on high heat, all the burners. And then once I'm about to put everything on, I'll turn it down. Usually I do about a medium heat when I'm cooking. And if I don't have enough chicken to, or whatever I'm cooking to cover the entire grill space, I will use one side of my grill, keep the other side on high and turn that side actually down even lower than medium to like a medium low. And use that kind of radiant heat from the other side heat the entire grill, use it kind of like an oven while you're also getting those grill marks on it.

So we know that when whatever meat it is that you're putting on the grill is sort of protected from carcinogens, if you do have some sort of like oil coating on it. So that, that leads me to marinades. Can you give us like maybe one or two ideas for a good marinade before we plop that chicken on the grill?

Yeah, absolutely. I try and keep my marinades a little bit lower in sugar content because the sugar obviously will burn and it does have kind of a bitter taste once it gets to the point of being blackened and burned. So marinades, I like to use soy-based a lot for grilling. So use a gluten-free tamari at home. I'll mix that with maybe some lemon juice or lime juice or orange juice if I want that citrus.

Is the main thing with a marinade the acid that we're looking for, or should we, like, what's the key to a good marinade?

I think it all depends on taste. Some of them I'll do are really herby, and it'll just be oil with some herbs, salt and pepper. Some of them that I do have more of that soy, which is the umami flavor with the tamari. Some of them I'm looking for more of a citrusy, fresh flavor, and I'll use lemon juice or lime juice or even orange juice for those. It really depends on what you're looking for. One thing to keep in mind is never marinate chicken in a pineapple because that will make the texture really, really weird. And you'd be surprised, I didn't know this until I made that mistake. Pineapple has some enzymes in it that break down.

Yeah, bromelain. Yeah. And papain. Yes.

So if you are using pineapple as a marinade, definitely want to leave it in there only 20, 30 minutes. And then—

Although, did you use fresh pineapple juice or canned?

Fresh.

Yeah. See that? So if you use canned, it's not the same. Those enzymes are killed once they can it.

Oh, interesting.

How about that? Look at me teaching John something. What?

There you go. There you go. Okay. So if you're using fresh pineapple juice, you definitely want to keep it to a short marinade time.

Can we, can we— So if we put it in a marinade, like in the morning before we are going to work, Is that okay?

Absolutely.

And what's the shortest amount of time that a marinade can still be effective?

I would think you definitely wanna be in the over 30 minutes range. Overnight's almost always gonna be best. And it's just the structure of the chicken muscle. As you can tell, it's more smooth and less porous than other things like steak or fish. So it does take a little while longer to accept that marinade and get the flavor to penetrate.

And then what do we do with the marinade after the chicken has sat in it? Can we reuse it? Can we cook with it or do we have to discard it?

So you actually can use it. The only thing is you have to put it in a pot and boil it first.

Okay.

It does have to get up above 165 degrees and stay there for at least 1 minute. Otherwise you could have some of the residual chicken juices, raw chicken juices in there, and that could make you sick.

So nobody likes that.

If you do want to use it, Absolutely. You can baste your chicken in it while you're cooking, as long as the last couple of minutes of cooking, you're not basting anymore. And if you do want to reuse the marinade, you do need to boil it. Like I said, up to 165 degrees minimum for 1 minute in order to kill all the bacteria that could be in there from the raw chicken juice.

Okay, cool. All right. So let's kind of summarize. What are your main, maybe like, 2 to 3 tips for people to walk away with when it comes to cooking chicken?

I think first and foremost is watch your temperature on cooking chicken breast. Always temperature, take the temperature as much as you can and, or as much as you need to, and pull it off when it gets to right about 160. If you get up to 165, that's okay. 170 might be starting to push it, but definitely don't want your chicken to go much over 170. Otherwise, it is going to have the carryover cooking once you pull it off and rest it, and it will get drier the higher temperature you go to. Another thing that I like is just the versatility of chicken. You can basically put anything on it, and it'll almost always taste good. So that's—

Except fresh pineapple.

Except fresh pineapple. And that is one thing that's great. And lastly, I think just that it's a really good lean protein, very healthy and good for you and an easy way to get good protein on pretty much any day of the week.

Yeah, awesome. Okay, so we will put that taco slow cooker chicken on the blog. And then I think that also the, The whole chicken with the buttered herbs. That was, that was really cool. So, um, we'll put, we'll stick those on the blog too. So that's another episode of Athletes in the Chicken, in the Chicken, Athletes in the Chicken, in the Chicken. Yep. So that's our new series, friends. Um, but yeah, thanks for listening. Uh, Chef John, thanks for joining us for Athletes in the Kitchen, and we will catch you next time.

All right. Thanks, Chris.

Mm-hmm.