One Simple Knife Trick Guarantees The Most Flavorful Chicken Breast

Chicken breast is one of those ingredients that's simple enough to cook yet even easier to mess up. If you're not careful with your flavors, timings, and temperatures, you can end up with a bland rubber puck that purports to be breast meat. However, one simple knife trick can help guarantee your chicken breast is not only mouthwateringly flavorful but nice and tender too. 

To start, you'll want to have a chicken marinade ready to go as your flavoring agent. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, a dry rub will do, or try this quick and simple marinade featuring fresh lemon, garlic, white wine, salt, and pepper, which we highly recommend to keep in your back pocket. Once you've gotten your marinade squared away, grab your chicken breasts, along with your sharpest knife, and get to crosshatching. By creating a grid of evenly spaced, diamond cuts on top of the breast, about halfway through the breast, you'll give your seasonings more opportunities to absorb into the meat. After you're done crosshatching throw your chicken breasts into a ziploc bag and pour the marinade over them, making sure to massage the liquid or rub into all the crevices you just created.

True pros like to refer to cutting slashes into your meat as gashing because crosshatching could be confused with grill marks and not actually cutting into your meat. We're not that particular here. As we mentioned above, adding slashes to your meat helps infuse flavor by increasing the surface area that the seasonings can attach to. In general, cutting against the grain of your meat is very important, and chicken is no different. If you just want to do one set of slices, scoring the meat against the grain helps make sure your chicken will stay tender as it cooks. If you're going for the full crosshatch, you'll be cutting both ways.

Figuring out how to cut against the grain for chicken is a bit trickier than for other meats because the grain is not as visible. Ultimately, it's as simple as cutting the chicken long ways, from the top fatter part to the bottom tip, so that you have nice long cuts. When crosshatching, you'll just want to go diagonally in a diamond shape, instead of horizontally. On top of adding more pockets for flavor to disappear into, this gashing method slices through thick fibers that tend to seize up during cooking, leading to a more delicate, easier-to-chew piece of chicken. If you're aiming to serve up a winner-winner chicken dinner, check out our 15 favorite chicken breast recipes to make sure your chicken dishes are never bland again.