Reverse Engineering Dinner: CR4 Challenge (03/25/08)

The salt won't dissolve in the oil very well. He's be better off to coat the chicken in oil then sprinkle the salt over the top.

You are absolutely right.

It is the basis for the old adage that served we well over the years (especially trying to get large amounts of Vaseline out of my hair...long story and embarrassing. You'll have to get me drunk to tell it)...

Like Dissolves Like.

Basically, salt is an ionic molecule, oil is a covalent molecule. I forget which one shares and which one transfers electrons but I will stake my reputation that that is the reason (not that it's a bet worth much)

Actually, you would rub the salt on the chicken, and then coat it with oil.

That allows the moisture on the chicken to dissolve the salt.

The oil helps to seal in the moisture and keep the skin of the chicken from drying out too much.

Think in scientific terms. The salt will dehydrate the skin and so assist in the browning -= putting oil on first will waterproof the chicken skin and stop dehydration.

Note an unrefined oil contains lecithins, free fatty acids and other goodies (great for flavour when raw but tend to decompose and cause problems at high temperatures) better to use refined oil for high temperatures.

I assume Tom is well refined enough to be purchasing only the highest quality extra virgin olive oil. The high end products have a larger free fatty acid content and a much lower smoke point- 375Deg F and lower.

At 400 degF Tom's quality oil will be testing his smoke detector and possibly sprinkler system. Tom ignores Johns recipe to prevent the fire.

I believe you've hit the nail on the head.

I had to learn about oil flash points the hard way some years back. A bag of oil absorbent and 2 fire trucks later everything was under control. Luckily for me, the absorbent was able to get the fire out before the fire fighters got there and hosed down my kitchen.

Even the fire department has these moments. The first time the crew was going to deep fry a turkey, they bought a complete frying set. They bought 5 gallons of peanut oil, Fired that mother up and waited for the New thermometer to reach the magic 325* number. Time slipped away and still not hot enough yet. The thermometer gets to 250* and the oil starts to smoke. By 275 the airport control tower wants to know if the fire station is on fire. When it reached 300 it was close enough. The amount of oil that shot out of the back end of the turkey was un believable. pulled the turkey out removed oil a little at a time till the oil stayed below the rim when the turkey went back in. ten minuets before the scheduled time for the turkey to come out his leg bone was so burnt that it fell off from the boiling action. That was it ,pulled the bird cut it open and threw it all out.

The thermometer later showed that in boiling water the gauge was still at 90*.

A good story, a good laugh and a good argument for calibration. Thanks Bob. TK

The oven may be at 400-DegF, but unless it's a fan oven there's little chance the oil that is actually on the chicken will reach more than about 300-DegF - which shouldn't be a problem. But as stated elsewhere the chicken will be drastically overcooked. Then, although salt does not dissolve in olive oil, I doubt this on its own would cause incredulity about John's level of cooking experience - more a mental query as to whether he properly understands his terminology.

If it were my meal, I would emulsify the salt and the oregano together with crushed garlic** and some other herbs and spices, using just sufficient olive oil to create a paste, and spread it over the chicken and cook for about twenty minutes. I would also only sprinkle the basil (or a basil paste) over the chicken immediately after removing the chicken from the oven.

**For my portion I would omit the salt - and depending on my guests, I might include the salt and/or omit the garlic from some portions...

I must agree, the 400 Degree F setting is quite high here. The chicken will be burnt to a crisp.

I think it has something to do with the fact that oil and the sait will not mix. Eitehr that or that he's using reverse polish for the order of the recipe's steps.

You Countryist. I have relatives that are Polish (even though I am not...Polish logic).

er...I hope my Polish friends aren't reading this, but if they are...

...era yeht fi tub ,siht gnidaer t'nera sdneirf hsiloP ym epoh I...re .(cigol hsiloP...ton ma I hguoht neve) hsiloP era taht sevitaler evah I .tsiyrtnuoC uoY

(PS If you're lesdysic you understood the second half. Try typing something backward...it will cause you to re-evaluate your typing skills )

now i understand the comment about the vaseline

LOL, good, and a you're a quick study, cause it took me a bottle and a half of shampoo, 80 gallons of hot water, an hour's contemplation with a straight razor, all counterpointed by my father's poorly contained guffaws until I thought about lighter fluid.

And do you know how scary a head full of lighter fluid is to a kid in a house full of smokers?

And all of this just so my hair would stay slicked back like the stylized Vladimir Dracul on Halloween. There was black shoe polish involved as well. The only saving grace is that was long before cell phone or digital cameras, and my family had a lackadaisical approach to having film on hand.

I've used lighter fluid to 'rescue' some shirts that my wife thought were doomed to go into the trash can. My wife is well-endowed in the chest area (nice when she was young; a bit of a pain to her as she approaches middle-age), and she somehow manages to drip bits of oil, fats, sauces, etc., onto her shirts.

The usual stain remover products she was using for the laundry did no good whatsoever in removing these greasy spots. So one day whan she was lamenting that a brand-new blouse was ruined I suggested she try soaking the spot in lighter fluid, blotting it with paper towels, and then washing the blouse again. She was wary, so I said I'd do it. (Big mistake as now I'm stuck doing this every time she stains a shirt.) This worked, and after the blouse was washed it looked good as new.

Another, and possibly safer, option is to rub butter into the stain. Looks a real mess, but is a great way of getting dirty black motor-oil stains out of clothes. The butter disolves the motor oil, then hot water and soap/detergent cleans off the butter/oil mixture.

Extra virgin olive oil while very healthy cold, becomes unhealthy when heated to frying or baking temperatures. Put the olive oil in your dipping sauce or on your salad, and cook with canola oil.

Sea Salts cannot be dissolved in Oil, even I know that

"dissolve sea salt in extra virgin olive oil," come off it!!! Cannot be done!!!

Hmmmm...

The salt can't dissolve in the oil because salt is a hydrophilic (gets along well with water) and the oil is a hydrophobic (hates water with a passion) so the two can't mix.

As for cooking the chicken at 400 deg. F for 1 hour, well, if it doesn't catch on fire the end product might be useful as a new soles for your shoes (if you can slice it into slabs) but that's about it.

While your use of Latin terminology was indeed chemical related and you had the hate and love thing going on in spades, I think you might have missed one, small point. There was never an aquatic element introduced into the problem. (unless it was tuna, or 'Chicken of the Sea').

Just sayin,...

Hi tomkaighin

Actually, my reference to the aquatic was only to say that they are not "like dissolves like". (as in your post #5)

If you put the salt into the oil with the herbs the salt would just sink to the bottom as it is heavier than the oil. If you then used up all of the oil suspension on the chicken, most of the pieces would be mostly saltless and the last piece or 2 would get all of the salt like an old hunk of jerky.

If I were going to prepare the chicken with the stated ingredients, I would 1st rub the chicken with the salt,(the moisture in the skin would help it to dissolve and stay with the chicken), sprinkle on the herbs (dried type) and then drizzle the oil on top to help the skin crisp up, maintain some of its moisture and also partly protect the herbs from burning into dust. Bake at 350deg. F for 20-30 minutes or until just firm.

Juicy, crispy herb flavored chicken done just right. mmmm mmmm Loving it!

If you mix it in a pestle, the salt will absorb water from the herbs and form an emulsion with the oil. Even without that, most methods of spreading the oil distribute the salt at the same time as the oil.

You will not dissolve salt in olive oil....

The smoke point for Olive Oil ranges from 320 F to 425 F depending on the free fatty acid percentage. A typical value for Extra Virgin Olive Oil is 410 F. Cooking at 400 F is very close to the smoke point and might burn the oil or at least produce a lot of smoke. 375 is a typical temp when cooking with oil.

The moisture in the chicken will delay the tendency to catch fire but vegetable oils like olive can self ignite at high temperatures as many cooks have found.

Along with the salt not dissolving in the oil, 1 hour at 400 degrees for chicken breast will probably dry out the breast to be inedible. The basil and oregano should probably be sitting in the oil for several weeks before it even starts to permeate the oil with an infusion. Yes! John does not cook very much!

Stuff the chicken with popcorn kernels--bake at 450 F. When it's

ass blows off it's done. Enjoy.. or give to the cats.

Oooooh, I like this much better than my beer can up the old cavity trick (and I get to drink the beer . Always a plus). And timer optional.

Where's the garlic? My mother taught me that garlic, Italian chesse and olive oil (first press - extra virgin) goes into everything, except tea and coffee.

My mother was a professional caterer, and I grew up "borrowing" good recipes from many sources. The secret is to first be a good cook yourself. After that, a recipe is just a suggestion. Your trained palate will detect the essential ingredients. Your experience will dictate proportions, sensible procedures, including cooking temperature.

John is not unique, even cookbook recipes contain some strange suggestions and should be interpreted in the spirit of "good engineering practice".

The salt won't dissolve in the olive oil.

However, John does know what he's talking about because even though it won't dissolve in the oil (lipids inert to ionic combination with NaCl), the moisture from the chicken will absorb enough of the salt when cooking (it does combine with water ionically) to make a lovely difference in that recipe for herbed chicken. It's not whether John's cooking is frequent or not that's the point here, because the dissolution of the salt in the oil is completely unnecessary to achieve the desired effect. More like Tom is just a bit overbearing in his comments. I suspect the chicken breasts are covered with foil and at 400^o for an hour will come out juicy and delicious.

Mark

(But, if the salt is dissolved in cider vinegar first, as in a vinaigrette salad dressing, and the oil is beaten in, it will "combine" with the sea salt in a miscible fluid enough to coat the chicken. The vinegar will boil off leaving behind a sweet taste.)

And maybe, just maybe, the lack of an instruction to enclose the chicken in foil is the what that is wrong with the recipe?...

I agree with Mark. If you want to season the meat with the sea salt, you need to dissolve it, preferably in some type of vinegar and water solution, and marinade it (let it soak in) for an hour or two before cooking. To speed up or amplify the process, perforate the meat repeatedly with a toothpick. The vinegar will also help tenderize the meat, as well as add flavor if it is a flavored vinegar (cider, malt, etc.).

After marinading the meat in the vinegary brine, poor it off and save to make a sauce. Then coat the meat in oil and sprinkle on your spices. Add spices to your saucepan as well if you want a strongly flavored sauce. Then heat the sauce to the point where it just simmers a little, without boiling away much liquid, stirring frequently so as not to scorch it. You want to be sure the sauce gets hot enough to kill any bacteria, especially since it was marinading raw chicken! If you want a thicker sauce, add a little cornstarch to the pan before heating.

Also, as others have said, lower the oven temperature a little so as not to burn the olive oil and extend your cooking time a little. If you want a crispier outside on the chicken, use the higher temp oil as suggested and bake at the higher temperature, being careful not to burn the meat. Remove when brown and check for done-ness. If interior meat (especially near bone) is still raw, continue to bake at lower temperature.

That's the way my Mom taught me to cook.

Or....Just throw them on the George Foreman grill after marinading with the spices sprinkled on just before grilling: skip the oil to save calories. Save the juice run-off for the saucepan. Grilling will crisp up the outside nicely, while the inside stays nice and juicy!

I used to make a recipe that was functionally similar to this (until I discovered that it tasted better to me without the salt). I would grind herbs, spices garlic and salt together in a mortar and pestle, and continue grinding while adding enough olive oil to make a paste - so I didn't care whether the salt was 'dissolved' or not. I'd then rub it on to the chicken and pop it into the oven; it usually took somewhere between 20-minutes and half and hour to cook. I can't speak as to the exact temperature, as I use an uncalibrated (and variable) oven for this - but I think it would be in the region of 400-440F.

My recipe for this did not include basil, but my general experience when cooking with basil is that its flavour is rather fragile, and only survives if protected from the fiercer heat. So I believe you would either need to place anything containing basil under the skin or add it at the end of cooking.

With apologies to my fellow oven cooking kitchen types, with whom I share an appreciation of oven cooking:

Quarter chicken

Garlic powder & Pepper combination both sides. For herbed chicken add the oil, basil, etc. before the pepper/garlic powder

No salt necessary

Place in covered dish

Oven to serving dish in 9-12 minutes done in turntable microwave. (minutes=regular size to grand size)

Eat the best danged moist tender chicken you ever tasted.

Mark

Go on! String me up, all you benighted anti-microwave fanatics. I dare you to try this recipe.

stupid

Hi, Guest!

I especially appreciate the brevity of your comment. It shows that a lot of thought went into encapsulating what must surely have been a very long and well thought-out discussion as to your opposition to the ideas expressed in my blog above.

Your consideration in shortening your dissertation to just a single word regarding the lack of awareness of...ummm... -whatever- elements in my blog you were opposing is greatly appreciated, and, really, brilliant.

I'll bet your occupation has something to do with editing.

Mark

"Stupid is as Stupid does." - Forrest Gump

The sea salt should be added after cooking the chicken breasts, and the oil should be applied when the chicken has been at least half ciooked, not during the initial stages. Sea salt doesn't dissolve well in extra virgen olive oil (though it could be suspended) and the oil would burn off and char the seasoning at 400° for an hour. The temperature seems a bit high, although lesser quality ovens and altitude differences may come into play there. I would recommend 350° for 50 minures, and then 400° to brown the meat.

Though the salt will not dissolve in the olive oil it's standard practice to mix the two for marinades. Then to be coated on the meat and set in the frig. for about 30 minutes. The oven temperature is a little low should be about 450 for first few minutes to sear in the moisture then dropped to 400 to 350. Chicken breast should be cooked about 35 to 45 minutes an hour seems a bit long.

Others have commented on the burning or smoking of the oil. Finish internal temperature for chicken is about 165 degrees.The surface temperature of the chicken will not get that hot unless too close to the heat source or you cook it over done.

I am not sure if the recipe is reverse engineering. But just trying to duplicate something.

You are correct, this is not "reverse engineering" any more than a garbage collector is a "Sanitation Engineer". Some folks just like to use fancy terminology. Cooking, baking, grilling, etc. all fall under the heading of Culinary Arts, and so this is truly more of an Artistic Reproduction, rather than Reverse Engineering.

Engineering can be a science or an application of technology, or both. Some people speak of The Art of Engineering, and once upon a time it was more of an Art, with practitioners acting more like skilled artisans. However, modern Engineering, although just as creative, is based much more in the Scientific Method. Reverse Engineering is applied by utilizing analytical instruments and measuring devices to de-construct an artifact or a process so that it can be replicated. There is usually very little or no guesswork involved, and so very little "artistic license" as there is in the art of cooking. That is not to say that Reverse Engineering will always "get it right" the first time. Iterative design approach, experimentation, and testing, may be necessary to approach 100% accuracy in replication.

Depending on the goal in mind, Reverse Engineering can also lead to product innovation, as the process yields an analytical model that can be re-shaped and "tweaked" to make improvements upon the original. If the goal is to offer only an exact replacement, then no changes are allowed. However, if the goal is to create a product that will meet or exceed the original specifications, then the Design Engineer, like an artist, has some amount of freedom to modify the original, to improve performance, enhance aesthetics as well as manufacturability, reduce cost, or some combination of all of these.

I recently completed a project to Reverse Engineer a product line that my company is currently purchasing from another manufacturer. Since the manufacturer is not about to provide us with detailed engineering drawings or models, this is the only way that we could prepare to produce a replacement product ourselves. When that was completed my boss said, "OK, now we know we can make it the same. How can we make it BETTER and CHEAPER?" In other words, how would we design this product ourselves, using best engineering practices and best fit to our production processes? Thank goodness he didn't say just "CHEAPER"!

Salt does not dissolves in oil

Hi, jcbriant!

Glad to have you aboard. I think your post agrees with the general concensus in here. Enjoy the CR4 ride! It's quite a trip.

Looking forward to seeing more of you in here,

Mark

You don't need herbs or any of the other ingredients to make charcoal. Even if a cooking container would have been mentioned! No hope for a tasty meal. The only way I would cook this is in foil so I could throw it out strait away with out having to clean the mess. Ky.

could it be that the Oven doesn't have F on it, only C, so he could have set the oven to 400 (or close enough) and over-crisped the chicken?

Traditionally, "seasoning" used for cooking, consisted of just salt and pepper.

ex chef.

Hi, geomech!

Love pepper. Salt's OK. But no glamour? No excitement? No adventure? No appeal to the better taste buds?

Must've been like eating cardboard night after night. How terribly sad.

Mark

DON'T SAY THAT! One of my few childhood memories (about 8 yrs old) was of eating a cardboard pizza.

I was at the drive in with parents and got one of the drive in pizza's. No light so I just kinda ate by feel. The pizza was really chewy but heck, it was bought at the theater (yippee).

Anyway, at the break, Dad turned on the light to straighten up the car. I looked at the last slice of pizza in the box and noticed that the top layer of the cardboard had become adhered to the bottom of the pizza. I think I got my daily dose of fiber that day.

Gidday MarkTheHandyman,

Love herbs and spices. Just pointing out that the term 'seasoning' strictly refers to salt and pepper. I know everyone refers to different herbs and spices as seasoning but they are incorrect. I come from the old school of cooking and hate using salt and pepper while cooking and only use it as little as possible, as I prefer to let the ingredients supply the flavour. If you want to use salt and pepper use it at the table.

We get great fresh fruit and vegies in Australia and don't need extra flavour enhancer such as salt.

I've never heard of salt being used to disguise meat starting to turn, but I have heard that cloves and pepper were used for that purpose quite extensively. Salt was always used as a preservative. since not too many biologicals can live on it (except for motorheads on the Nevada Salt Flats, but a lot of them have died on that too)

I was told that the added salt is to raise the temperature that the water would boil at. Similar to the effect of a pressure cooker. The higher temperature would cause the pasta to cook faster. What do you experts say to this. ( I still have to read the recipe for boiled eggs.)

Hi, geomech!

Couple of months ago, a colleague got tons of BIG chicken breasts on sale. Put about 15 (no bone, no skin) into a ceramic dish -side by side, no overlapping-, a sheet of aluminum foil over the top, booted up the oven to preheat to about 425F and stuck em in for about 1/2 hour. No seasonings, herbs or spices at all --nothing. He just forgot! Best, moist, tender delicious chicken breasts I ever ate. Couldn't stop. Ate 3!

I never eat anything that isn't spiced up to be delicious...generally...but those chicken breasts were fantastic.

Ya never know...

Mark

After cooking for 1 hour @ 400 F the chicken breast either turned to charcoal or best case scenario...Chicken Jerky.

mmmmmmm.....Chicken Briquettes!

You know, we really don't get enough Carbon in our diets!

What is this "Jerky" stuff?

400 for an hour???

sounds like a good recipe for chicken jerky. Especially with the salt leaching out all the available water, as well as the oil smoking at 375, plus the fact the herbs will be blackened, and bitter.

Salt will not disolve in oil.

Wonder if sea salt will dissolve in oilive oil !!!!

Another poor answer?
The source (whfoods.com) states that some of the beneficial properties of extra virgin olive oils may be degraded at temperatures as low as 300F - but there is no support there for using "regular" olive oil instead. In any case, by the time the surface temperature of chicken breasts in a 400-degree oven reaches 300-degrees, the chicken underneath will surely have gone hard? The real problem is the excessive cooking time.