hainanchicken

I've read in Modernist Cuisine and various other sources that injection brining is great because the salt is delivered straight to the interior of the chicken and can then diffuse faster. I've also read that you can add oils and fat-soluble flavor molecules in the brine you're injecting. However, I thought that marinades are largely a surface treatment because while the sodium can diffuse into the meat, the fat-soluble flavor molecules are too large to diffuse through cell walls. If that's the case, then why would injecting fat-soluble flavor molecules into a few interior spots work? Wouldn't the flavor molecules just clump up and not diffuse through the meat?

I'm also wondering if I can get more ginger/scallion flavor onto the chicken if I sous vide the chicken with neutral-tasting oil instead of water. Does anybody have experience with SV with oil vs. water if you're trying to impart aromatics onto chicken without searing?

So you don’t add any green onions to the poaching liquid for the chicken? Is it that certain aromatic compounds don’t contribute that much flavor while poaching because they’re not water soluble?

@gfweb Thanks for the response. But in the case of a leak, loss of gas, etc. how would I deal with that?

When using MAP-Pro cylinders, are there any tips on safety in the home? How should they be stored in the home to avoid explosion? How often should I be checking up on the cylinder for leaks?

@blue_dolphin I was referring to the continuous graphs plotted in the images, where it shows the listeria (surface) and listeria (core) lines. @btbyrd If I don't pasteurize, doesn't that mean I need a super fresh chicken? If a raw chicken breast had been sitting inside my fridge for a day and then I took it out, would I still have 4 hours of leeway without pasteurization within which to cook and then eat the chicken?

@paulraphael, is there an alternative nowadays to the SV Dash app you used to get those charts? I tried to find this in the iOS App Store, but it doesn't seem to exist. I've been looking at doing SV chicken breast to 140F, but it takes way too long to get the core to 140F and then wait another 20 minutes to pasteurize. I assume most of the bacteria lives on the surface, so is it safe to let the core cook to 140F and then stop cooking, since the surface would have been at 140F for longer than 20 minutes?

@Duvel I kind of gave up for a while because I had so many failures. But I'm fairly confident now that the main problem was that I was cooking to too high of a temperature. Anything higher than 140F for the breast seems to result in the wrong texture. I haven't studied the dark meat too closely yet. Here in SF I have been buying poultry from a variety of sources. There is obviously some difference in supermarket frozen vs fresh, but it seems that the temperature has a bigger effect. In particular, I'm looking at the difference between 黄毛鸡 and supermarket frozen chicken.

I haven't experimented yet since the original post, but I find it strange that the chicken is first dunked in boiling water, then the heat is then shut off, and then the heat slowly diffuses through the bird. Without sous vide, there aren't many other ways you can carefully control the temperature of the bird, but even if the inner breast meat is cooked to a low temperature (like 140F), wouldn't the outer part of the breast be cooked at way too high of a temperature? To this end, when I eat this dish at restaurants, how can they truly be sure that the bird is cooked thoroughly? I highly doubt they have measured that the inner breast meat, for example, has reached 140F for 10-20 minutes for pasteurization. Are they just taking a risk? And another thought I have is that given that dark meat and white meat require different cooking in sous vide, perhaps it would be better to cook the bone-in breast in a bag and then bone-in dark meat in a separate bag at different temperatures. I may try this again this weekend.

Whenever I go to Chinese restaurants to eat soy sauce chicken, the breast meat is always silky smooth and very, very soft. (In case you are unfamiliar, cantonese soy sauce chicken is basically gently poached by boiling soy sauce mixture, putting in chicken, shutting off heat, taking chicken out, boiling it again, shutting off meat, putting chicken back in, etc. So it is akin to using sous vide to cook it.) When I sous vide at even temperatures as low as 140F, however, the texture is just not right. It's not silky smooth like the ones I have in restaurants. What am I missing? Is there some special prep step they are using?

I actually want to poach them afterwards (in sous vide bags), as I'm testing hainan chicken, but yes. I'm wondering if anybody has any explanations for the science that's going on, though, especially if I'm not roasting. I'm curious if any complex oil molecules can actually permeate from inside to outside or vice versa.

Since purchasing Modernist Cuisine at Home, I've been trying really hard to apply sous vide and other techniques to making a good Hainan Chicken Rice (aka Khao Mun Gai) recipe for weeks, but I haven't gotten the success I was expecting. I'm wondering if you all would have any tips. Traditionally, the chicken is gently poached in a water bath with a few aromatics, like ginger, garlic, pandan leaf. After the chicken is cooked, the water (now broth) is used to make chicken-flavored rice, along with some rendered chicken fat. I've been trying many techniques to get the chicken to have enough chicken flavor, but I haven't yet gotten it right. Here's some of what I've tried: Seal a whole chicken with water and aromatics in a bag and sous vide at 165F for 90 minutes. The texture wasn't great for the chicken breast but the flavor was not bad. Not super strong, but passable. The broth wasn't too strong either. I wanted to get more chicken flavor, so I tried doing the same thing in a chicken broth instead. Not really any flavor change. Then, I wanted to cook just the breast to get the texture better. I sous vide just the breast in a bag with water at 149F for 1 hour. Chicken was tender, but it had almost no chicken flavor. Since there was no flavor, I tried rubbing salt on the breast (no water) for long enough for equilibrium brining, as you say it helps retain moisture (and ostensibly "chicken flavor"). I then sous vide at 149F for 1 hour. I purposely didn't put any water in the bag because I didn't want the chicken breast to draw in pure tap water and dilute the chicken taste. Is this science right? Anyways, the chicken had no flavor again. What gives? I assumed that brining the chicken in broth with salt would bring in chicken flavors from the stock, but it doesn't seem like that did anything. At the same time, I'm worried that brining the chicken breast and then putting it in tap water would just draw in all the water and dilute the chicken taste. How can I increase the chicken taste? Any tips?

I'm curious if anybody has a better answer now, 7 years later. If you brine chicken in chicken broth + salt, would the flavor from the chicken broth get inside the chicken (you can replace chicken broth with milk, cider, etc.)? If so, how does that work? I thought the complex oil molecules are too large to permeate?