Why You Should Pour Boiling Water On Your Chicken Thighs



If you’re someone who enjoys crispy chicken thighs, there’s something you should be doing before cooking them. The secret to crispy skin on your chicken thighs — or any chicken part for that matter — is water…….boiling water to be precise. When you poor boiling water on chicken skin, it immediately begins to shrink, pull back, and get much thinner and translucent due to the subcutaneous fat rendering under the skin and between the meat. This renders down everything that we work to render out during a perfect cook — like getting enough time skin-side down to brown while the fat renders. A lot of competition BBQ people will pull the skin off the thigh, invert it, and scrape the fat off. Pouring boiling hot water on the chicken achieves the same result in a shorter amount of time and with way less work. So, when do you season the chicken? The best thing to do is dry brine the chicken with kosher salt in the refrigerator overnight, uncovered. This helps the flavor and also dries out the skin, which, when paired with the boiling water, gets the skin super crispy. Even if you skip the overnight dry brine, this one quick step will render out that extra fat, resulting in some of the crispiest chicken skin you’ve ever had.