Salt Marinated Chicken


Salt, doesn’t that look nice? I finally got a chance to use a portion of the Coarse Italian Sea salt I bought a while ago. A few months ago I marinated a whole chicken in a salt marinade for nearly 3 days. This bird came out absolutely amazingly moist & happy. You’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between that and a fancy rotisserie one. Interested? Yes you are. That was a bit long and the Meathead family had a disaster of a time reproducing it. So, this last Saturday I decided to lay down some recipe that was reproducible. What I came up with only takes 2 hours and just couldn’t possibly be any easier. This will render you rotisserie juice flavor action with almost no work. How do you like that? A lot. Time to move on.



preheat oven to 375, bottom rack
One really needs to find some decent coarse sea salt. Coarse grind kosher salt is still too small, look for something with a noticeable chunk like factor.
You’ll need a decent whole chicken. Dig out a 1/4 cup, … er cup. Measure out 1/4 cup of your salt.
Wash your chicken inside & out, THOROUGHLY dry. Rub salt all over and inside chicken.
Put in bowl & cover, toss in to fridge for 2 hours.
Rinse chicken THOROUGHLY and dry THOROUGHLY. I even heered told of someone using a hair dryer to get that bird dry, this will help with getting skin extra crispy.
At this point, do what you want. I used extra virgin olive oil and herbs, inside & out. Oh and some fresh ground white pepper.
DO NOT ADD EXTRA SALT ON CHICKEN. It’s salty enough, foo.

I used the MeatHenge method to roasting chickens. 1 hour upside down, 30 minutes right side up.
If you look in the fry pan, you’ll see some garlic. I cut the top & bottom off 3 heads of garlic, doused in olive oil, put in pan to cook with chicken.
Made pan sauce with 3 heads of roasted garlic. HEAVEN !!!
How does that look?

How did it taste? Divine.

5 thoughts on “Salt Marinated Chicken

  1. Yeah, I think so. They were pretty darned close. The 3 day chicken had a little different texture, as though it had been cooked a bit.
    See, Kim used to work at Zuni over in the city and mentioned they ‘marinated’ their chickens in salt. So it sat in there for a few days. Turns out, Zuni just lightly salts it with herbies and stuff. I believe what I did had TONS more salt. A little different, but I got the idea from Kim.

  2. Hi Dr. B,
    The TJ’s organic chicken is salted, the 1940 O’Keefe & Merritt is preheating and Grandma’s cast iron fry pan awaits its participation in this wonderful meal. Sounds great and I’ll let you know.
    The other day the girls at Satin Moon mentiond the yummy way Zuni prepares their chicken and you were my first hit in my search for a similar recipe. Must have been meant to BE 🙂
    Thanks!!!

  3. Hi Casonna,
    Oh my, I hope it came out alright. My brother inlaw tried it, but with Kosher salt and it ruined the chicken. I was able to pull off what I did because I used very coarse sea salt.
    I’ve got the Zuni cookbook, should follow their instructions and post that.
    xo, Biggles