The BEST Grilled Lemon Chicken | How to Grill Chicken (Easy Recipe!) (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to grilling chicken? ›

Cook your chicken breast on the grill for 6-8 minutes on one side. Flip your chicken. After 6-8 minutes open your grill lid and flip your chicken breast with tongs. A great tip is to only flip your chicken breast once so that it stays nice and juicy (and creates delicious grill marks!)

Tender Juicy Chicken: The acidic lemon juice helps break down muscle fibers, making the chicken more tender. The oil and other ingredients help lock in moisture, guaranteeing juicy, flavorful chicken. Flavorful: Lemon and garlic are a classic combo, while mustard adds tang, and red pepper flakes add a subtle kick.

Most recipes for marinating meat and poultry recommend six hours up to 24 hours. It is safe to keep the food in the marinade longer, but after two days it is possible that the marinade can start to break down the fibers of the meat, causing it to become mushy.

Lemon juice (Citrus limon) is a widely used ingredient of meat marinades, most often used as a preservative and improver of sensory properties of products [21,22].

Here's why: Lemon juice helps to tenderize meat, but when left for too long, it will break down the proteins too much, making the meat tough and rubbery… sometimes even mushy. So, if you want tender, juicy, and flavorful chicken, make sure to only marinate the chicken for 2-3 hours.

Take the chill off the meat

While Robins recommends taking it out of the refrigerator 20 to 30 minutes before cooking, Wilschke advocates for longer, as long as a couple of hours.

Food safety authorities and regulators around the world recommend you don't wash raw poultry before cooking. That's because washing chicken can splash dangerous bacteria around the kitchen. It's best just to thoroughly cook the chicken without washing it, so it is safe to eat.

If your chicken breast are tough, you cooked them too long. Chicken breasts are hard to get right because they have a fat end and a skinny end. The fat end takes a bit longer to cook. Cooked perfectly, a chicken breast is moist and tender, with no pink flesh in the middle of the thickest part.

Even removing the lid too often from the grill results in heat escaping and the temperature dropping. This may lead to uneven cooking of the chicken. Keeping the lid closed on the grill to cook the chicken more evenly.

The covering helps prevent excessive evaporation and keeps the chicken moist throughout the cooking process. Preventing dryness. Chicken tends to dry out more quickly when exposed to direct heat. Covering the chicken creates a barrier that prevents the top surface from drying out, resulting in tender meat.

Should I cover my grill with aluminum foil? ›

This is a major NO-NO. Laying the foil on the grates can restrict the intended air flow inside the grill, which could lead to damage of the internal components, not to mention create a dangerous situation.

The key steps to really juicy grilled chicken are kitchen essentials — lessons that even the most seasoned griller should revisit each year. Pound the chicken thin for more even cooking, brine or marinade for flavor and color, and grill over direct heat for grill marks, but finish over low heat to keep them juicy.

You don't have to, but you certainly should. Not only does this help keep the meat from sticking to the grill, but it induces more of a caramelization on the exterior of the meat, which is always a good thing, but usually something one has to sacrifice when choosing to grill (as opposed to pan-sear) a piece of meat.

There are a few things you can do to keep your chicken from sticking to the grill grates: rub the chicken with oil before grilling, make sure not to flip your chicken too early, and be sure to clean the grill grates before putting the chicken on.

The simplest answer is yes, most of the time, you need to coat the grill rack with oil to prevent food from sticking. When your grill rack is "well-seasoned" that may not be necessary for foods with some fat, but will likely still be the case when grilling produce and lean meats and fish.