Pan-Seared Chicken Breasts

From America's Test Kitchen Season 11: Weeknight Workhorses

A boneless, skinless chicken breast doesn’t have the bone and skin to protect it from the intensity of a hot pan. Inevitably, it emerges moist in the middle and dry at the edges, with an exterior that’s leathery and tough. We wanted a boneless, skinless chicken breast that was every bit as flavorful, moist, and tender as its skin-on counterpart.

We decided to utilize a technique that we’ve used -successfully in the test kitchen with thick-cut steaks (see page 109), where we gently parcook the meat in the oven and then sear it on the stovetop. First, we salted the meat to help it retain more moisture as it cooked. To expedite the process we poked holes in the meat, creating channels for the salt to reach the interior of the chicken as it parcooked. We then placed the breasts in a baking dish and covered it tightly with foil. In this enclosed environment, any moisture released by the chicken stayed trapped under the foil, keeping the exterior from drying out without becoming so overly wet that it couldn’t brown quickly.

The next step was figuring out how to achieve a crisp, even crust on our parcooked breasts. We turned to a Chinese cooking technique called velveting, in which meat is dipped in a mixture of oil and cornstarch to create a thin protective layer that keeps the protein moist and tender, even when exposed to ultra-high heat. We replaced the oil with butter (for flavor) and mixed flour in with the cornstarch to avoid any pasty flavor. The coating helped the chicken make better contact with the hot skillet, creating a thin, browned, crisp veneer that kept the breast’s exterior as moist as the interior.