Smoked Chicken Breasts - Cured and Smoked Chicken Breast Cold Cuts - How to Smoke Chicken Breast
Author: Whats4Chow
Recipe type: Chicken / Smoked
This is part 10 of our short course on smoking and curing meats. Today we're curing and smoking chicken breast for use as cold cuts.
Ingredients
- 8-16 Skinless, boneless chicken breasts
For the Brine
- 5lt Water
- 12.5g Saltpetre
- 60g Sugar
- 300g Salt (Kosher or dairy or rock salt)
- 30g Black pepper corns
- 10g Whole allspice
- 45g Whole or ground coriander seed
- 50ml Bicarbonate of soda
Instructions
- To cure the chicken, pour 5 liters of water into a large non-reactive pot. Add the saltpetre, sugar, salt, black pepper corns, whole allspice, coriander and bicarbonate of soda.
- Bring this to a boil, lower the heat and allow this to simmer for 10 minutes. Quick-chill the brine by floating it in a sink of cold water.
- Pour the solution into a large non-reactive container. Use a ladle to remove about 250ml of the liquid and pour this through a fine filter.
- Use your brining syringe to inject the filtered brine into the chicken breasts. Insert the needle all the way into the breasts from the thick end. Slowly remove the needle as you expel the liquid. Inject each breast 3 times.
- Place the breasts in the remaining brine, put the lid on the container and let this cure for 12 hours in your refrigerator. If you have not injected the breasts, allow the chicken to cure for a full 24 hours in your refrigerator.
- The following day, remove the breasts from the curing brine and pat them dry using clean dish cloths.
- Transfer the breasts to stainless wire racks.
- Fire up your cold smoker with apple wood chips. For the first 30 minutes we are cold smoking the chicken, so none of the barbecue burners will be lit.
- Place the chicken in the barbecue and allow these to smoke for 30 minutes.
- After 30 minutes, ignite the burner furthest from the chicken and raise the temperature in the barbecue to 110c or 230f.
- Insert your probe thermometer into the center of the thickest breast, close the lid and allow the chicken to smoke for 2 to 2.5 hours until the internal temperature reaches 79c or 174f.
- Remove the chicken from the barbecue and allow it to cool completely before vacuum packing for storage in your refrigerator or freezer.