Boost Chicken Marinade To Its Full Flavor Potential With One Quick Step

There is no simpler, more versatile way to infuse chicken with flavor than using a marinade. Provided you build your marinade with the right ratio of fat to acid, the options for flavor profiles are pretty much endless. Sesame oil and rice vinegar for East Asian dishes, butter and lemon for bright Italian fare, avocado oil and lime for Mexican marinades, and so on. Acid tenderizes muscle fibers in the meat while fat carries flavor, transforming relatively bland, boring chicken breast into something you'll be excited to make again.

Of course, that's as long as the marinade does its job, as thicker cuts of chicken can be stubborn when it comes to soaking up flavor. Some meaty (pun intended) breasts and thighs may still taste bland even after an eight-hour bath in a perfectly balanced marinade. In these cases, your chicken may need a little help in the form of scoring. Parallel cuts made horizontally or diagonally across each cut of meat helps the marinade penetrate deeper to create a juicier bite bursting with intensity.

The trick here is to score your chicken breast just deep enough to help all those delicious flavors infuse all the way through each piece without cutting through your chicken or creating thin spots that cook unevenly. You want your scoring to be fairly shallow, perhaps about a quarter of the way through your chicken. It's also perfectly okay to gently press the minced garlic from your zesty, two-ingredient soy marinade into those cuts to ensure it's doing its job.

Just as you don't want scoring on your chicken to be too deep, it's also important to avoid not enough or too many cuts, as slicing it to ribbons could ruin the texture, while having too few scores may not give you the intended effect. While scores don't need to be precisely distanced, they should ideally be about a ½ inch to 1 inch apart for the best results. Spacing will vary based on the size of your chicken pieces, with larger pieces easily accommodating more space between scores, and smaller pieces naturally having less space between them. In fact, if your chicken is particularly small, you may want to avoid scoring it altogether in favor of poking it with a fork instead. The tiny holes will help carry flavor without sacrificing the structural integrity of the chicken.

This is an especially good hack for meal prepping, as you can freeze your perfectly marinated chicken, and scoring only takes a few extra seconds for each piece. Thawing activates the marinade, which will pool in the scores as it melts, effortlessly bringing your main dish to life. This technique also works well with a variety of cooking methods, though the scores may disrupt perfect grill marks (but it will still taste delicious). It's especially great if you prefer techniques that don't impart much flavor on their own, such as baking, poaching en papillote (inside parchment paper), or steaming inside individual foil packs.