When I first started this blog, I wrote about reheating chicken breasts without making them rubbery. I wanted to expand on that for a minute and let you know about this awesome product that I found.
First, I should explain that I like to cook a bunch of chicken breasts at the beginning of the week and keep them in the fridge so that my husband and I can take them to our respective jobs and eat them for lunch. (I use the word "respective" loosely, as my current job totally blows.) Reheating that chicken in an oven is obviously impossible at work, so its either eat the chicken cold, or microwave it. Either way makes the chicken harder to eat, so I've started marinating the shite out of all the chicken before I cook it. Remember what a marinade does? It starts breaking down the fibers of the meat before you cook it so that you get a more tender product. Its like sending Mr. T in to give your meat a good, eight hour talking-to before you put it on the grill. But I don't always feel like mixing up a marinade from scratch (I've got to save my energy for more important things like cocktail hour and writing this blog... the two sometimes happen simultaneously), and that's where this awesome product comes in.
1888 Premium Olive Press is this killer dirty martini mixer that is the very first of its kind. (Google it and order some pronto! Or, if you live in Texas, you can find it at your liquor store.) Seriously, no one else has ever thought of this, and that's just crazy: its made by pressing whole olives in a giant gazillion-pound press, taking the olive juice and bottling it. This happens to make a dangerously good dirty martini because your cocktail ends up tasting like olives, not ocean water. It also makes a bad ass marinade. I have been pouring 1888 over chicken breasts, salting them, and letting them sit overnight before I roast them in the oven. This way, not only is the chicken super tender when it comes out of the oven, but it stays super tender when I eat it cold or reheat it in the microwave. It only flavors the chicken lightly, which I like, because a lot of marinades are BBQ or smokey flavored, and I'm not always in the mood for that.
As advanced as the culinary arts have become, its funny that there are still only two ways to tenderize meat. You either marinate it, or beat the crap out of it. For real, those are your two options. Even on an angry day, I'm much happier to pour a bottle of olive juice on my chicken than start a fight with it. (And then I can enjoy a martini at the same time. Score!)
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