Grilled Chicken with Lemon and Herbs seems hard to screw up

Time: 4 Hours

Difficulty: 1/5

Ingredient Availability: 5/5

I almost always say that lemon makes everything better. Lemon on chicken is rarely bad, so I was excited to give this recipe a try. Put it all on a grill and I expect it to be even better. That’s really about it, so lets see how it turned out.

Key Ingredients and Omissions:

The only change I made to this recipe was to use chicken leg quarters instead of whole chickens. I didn’t leave out any ingredients from this recipe. I forgot to take a picture of all of the ingredients.

Tools:

• Grill

Cooking Review:

Making Marinade: 20 minutes

To make the marinade, I ended up needing to squeeze 4 lemons to get a little over 1 cup of juice, while the recipe calls for 1.5 cups of juice. I then whisked in the dijon mustard before slowly whisking in the olive oil. The recipe says that this should form a think emulsion, but mine didn’t really thicken much, if at all. At this point, I added the rest of the ingredients, including the bruised herbs despite the recipe saying to add them after the marinade was added to the chicken.

Marinating and Grilling: 3.5 Hours

After letting the chicken marinate for 1.5 hours, I put it on the grill at around 250 degrees F for an hour before flipping and cooking for another hour. I checked the temperature and ensured it was at 165 degrees F.

Analysis:

The lemon flavor in this chicken was pretty light, which is a little disappointing. The flavor overall is good, but nothing special. The saltiness level is good and there is a nice savoriness overall. I think I probably should’ve cooked the chicken a little longer to get some better textural contrast between the skin and meat, but it was cooked fully and was tender and juicy. I honestly think that most of these flavors could have been achieved from common seasonings. I’m not sure that the marination made that much of a difference at the end of the day. I’m giving this recipe a 7/10. It’s easy, but I think it might be unnecessary. If you use a lemon pepper seasoning and grill it, I think you would be about 80% of the way to this recipe, if not more.