The Secret To The Juiciest Chicken Breast Ever Is Already In Your Kitchen

It's easy — laughably easy — to bungle any recipe involving chicken breast. Cook it too much, and you're stuck with a dry, rubbery thing that resembles a flat tire more than a piece of poultry; cook it too little, and you'll end up with medium-rare chicken, and nobody wants that. Chicken breast can be unforgiving, but there are ways to make it shine.

Just take some advice from The Woks of Life, a family-run cooking blog that focuses on Chinese cooking techniques and recipes. Their secret? Adding water to the marinade before throwing chicken breast on the grill.

Author Kaitlin Leung notes that adding water to a marinade — a technique she learned from her own mother — yields a succulent, juicy outcome when applied to small cuts of chicken breast. And this ingenious approach makes sense. After all, we often brine chicken in salty water before throwing it onto a skillet. In the same vein, a marinade with water can penetrate the meat, just as a good brine does.

Marinades can be as simple or elaborate as you'd like, ranging from a simple concoction of olive oil, lemon, and whole-grain mustard to a Mediterranean mixture with sumac, mint, and tahini. Start with a preferred recipe, then add a splash of water. Leung's own recipe uses 1/3 to 1/2 cup of water for one pound of chicken. You'll want to marinate your chicken for a couple of hours, giving ample time for the marinade to seep into the chicken breast.

How you cook your chicken breast is up to you, and it's a critical factor in creating a well-cooked dish, no matter how perfect your marinade might be. As Leung suggests, consider slicing or pounding your chicken breast into thinner filets for a more manageable piece of poultry that absorbs more marinade and requires less cooking time. For a pounded piece of chicken about 1/2 inch thick, try cooking for six minutes on each side over medium heat — like this parmesan-crusted chicken breast. Keep an internal thermometer on hand to check the ideal minimal temperature, 165 degrees Fahrenheit, of the cooked chicken.

And before your chicken breast even hits the skillet, pat the exterior dry, particularly if you're planning on grilling or searing it. The dry edges will brown more quickly and easily, while the water-infused marinade will keep the interior lush and juicy.