Cooking Skyrim: Grilled Chicken

    The first recipe I tried for this series of posts is Grilled Chicken.  The ingredients are Salt Pile (so, large-grained table salt) and Chicken Breast (self-explanatory).  I borrowed from a friend one of those salt grinders that some people buy—you know, the kind that has to be turned upside-down when grinding—and I think that was about the right size of salt grain for the dish.  The chicken breasts were normal uncooked chicken breasts, though they were all farm-raised.  The packaging said things like "natural" and "organic," but those aren't protected terms, and can mean anything from "Chicken wire isn't natural" to "Technically all carbon-based lifeforms are organic."

You can just about see the giant grains of salt on this raw piece of chicken.

    I started by grinding the sea salt onto a piece of raw chicken; you can use cutlets or whole breasts, but breasts will take longer and should be cooked on lower heat.  I made several different attempts on different occasions, but the first time, I decided on an actual grill.  If you don't have a friend who owns a charcoal or gas grill, there may be some at parks or camping sites near you.  For most accurate results, use actual firewood as a heat source, instead of lighter fluid-soaked charcoal briquettes; for ease and cheapness, just do things the usual way.

A piece of chicken on the grill, using pressed-charcoal briquettes.

    The metal bars leave a characteristic pattern of marks, and—to me—are part of what makes something "grilled" rather than "fried" or "roasted."  Raw chicken is pink and translucent, while cooked chicken is white and opaque; wait until the white creeps up the side to about halfway, then flip the piece with a spatula or tongs.  It can take about twenty (20) minutes to fully cook, depending on the heat of your grill and how well-done you like your meat.

See the lovely grill marks?  See them???

    This piece shrank a bit, like most meat does when cooked, but it came off the grill slightly browned and bearing those marks I wanted.  It was a little dry, and fairly boring; in the spirit of not altering the recipe, I added more salt, and that really seemed to help.  It was still just salt and chicken, though.

    The next attempt was the quick-and-easy version, which starts the same (sprinkle kosher salt onto raw chicken) and then pivots to MICROWAVE.  Place the salted chicken in a covered, microwave-safe dish and cook for two (2) to three (3) minutes on High, or whatever full power is for your microwave oven.

Ceramic or glass is the best choice for a microwave-safe dish.

    Chicken cooked in this way will be pale, and if overdone can have a rubbery texture.  The Maillard reaction, which browns the outside of cooked meat and caramelizes sugar, doesn't occur in a microwave oven.  It is faster than grilling, though, and—unless you prefer your meat crispy or charred—doesn't make much of a difference to the final flavor.  Which, in this case, is lightly salted chicken.

Please ignore the fork marks in my chicken.

    I actually do this a lot for meals, though I usually dump a bunch of pepper on it first, or else put the chicken on a bun with some kind of sauce.  On its own, though, the chicken is fine, if uninspiring.

    For the third version, I went for pan-frying as a kind of compromise between the browning a grill gives and the convenience a microwave oven offers.  The best choice would be one of those frying pans with a ridged bottom, mimicking the bars on a grill; I don't have one of those, unfortunately, though we definitely had one growing up.  They are a bit harder to clean, I admit!  So I used a normal frying pan.

    When frying, one needs fat.  Some cuts of meat, like bacon, are fatty enough that they don't need any added; but chicken breast does.  In the spirit of not adding anything extraneous, you might use schmalz, or chicken fat, which would definitely be available but wouldn't alter the flavor of the dish.  Beef or mutton tallow and pork lard or even suet would all be available in Skyrim, as well.

Schmalz is like Crisco but harder.  This is mine, from a local farmers' market!

    If you don't want to do that, you could use a vegetable oil with a high smoke point, like olive or rapeseed.  I guess theoretically they must have grapeseed oil, because of Jazbay Grapes, and the normal sorts of cotton can produce cottonseed oil, so it's just barely possible that Tundra Cotton might be harvested for its oil.  There is also, apparently, rice bran oil, which could be made from Saltrice—but not, I think, in Skyrim.

    This round was probably the greatest departure from the recipe as-written thus far, because I used the leaves of a leek in an attempt to infuse some flavor into the chicken.  Most people chop off the leaves, but I found them unobjectionable, and they make a great little bed to prevent the bottom of the chicken from burning or sticking to the frying pan.

Chicken with leek leaves in a ceramic pan.

    Even that didn't add much flavor, though; leeks are pretty mild, the leaves even more so than the stalk.  So I just completely covered the chicken with the chopped leeks.

You can't even tell there's chicken under there.

    This sort of worked, and it does impart a light onion-y flavor to the meat.  And if you squint at the photo, you can see that the chicken is getting nicely browned on the outside.  The leeks ended up quite soaked with grease, though—all translucent and floppy.  Either I used too much fat, or they just don't benefit from frying as opposed to grilling or roasting.

    Finally, I had to try some kind of herbed chicken, regardless of the Skyrim recipe.  Salt, yes, but also sage, which is probably the inspiration for Elves Ear.  I couldn't find dried sage leaves—a bit odd, given how common basil leaves are in the dried herbs section of larger supermarkets—so I got fresh ones.

Fresh sage, with silver fuzz on the leaves and stem.

    I used twine to tie the sage to the chicken, then placed it in a covered dish with some brine (because water is invisible in Skyrim cooking!).  Brine is apparently about 1 part large-grained salt to 8 parts water, which is a *lot* of salt; I'm glad I was doing only a small flat piece of chicken!  I decided to use the same dish for brining as for cooking, so I chose an oven-safe container.

Glass and ceramic are best for conventional ovens, too.

    I let my chicken brine for six hours, but the Internet agrees that anything from four to twelve hours will do when brining poultry.  A small piece, like a single breast, can be brined for as little as one to four hours, though.  That may be why mine was a bit too salty—or it could be that I didn't pat the surface of the chicken dry before cooking.

Obviously, I removed the twine and leaves before eating.

    When the dish came out, the sage smell was *so* strong, I thought I wouldn't be able to eat it.  However, once I removed the leaves, the chicken itself turned out to have a pretty mild sage flavor.  (I would not eat these leaves like one eats parsley or basil.)  I think the only real downside to choosing sage instead of some other herb was that my previous experience with it had been limited to a hand soap used in my friends' bathroom, so I spent several minutes wondering, "Why does this chicken remind me of soap?" before I figured it out.

    You can see in the picture that baking chicken in a covered dish does give the same solid white appearance that microwaving it does; however, the chicken ended up more tender in the conventional oven than the microwave oven.

    Of course, the grilled chicken was the most authentic to the recipe; aside from the leeks, the pan-frying method is probably the next-closest one.  For more flavor than "chicken with salt," I'm not wild about sage, but other people might be, and the leeks did add that onion-y taste.  Folks who live where Juniper Berries are grown might try cooking the chicken with that—possibly brining with the berries before grilling—and one could always garnish with parsley (Frost Mirriam).

    I never did get to try cooking over a wood fire, though I know there are cages and grills for that purpose; I'll have to see if I know anyone who frequents campgrounds.  That's all I can do for now, though.  If anyone does try other herbs, or cooks in a hearth or over a campfire, I'd love to hear about it in the comments!