British BBQ Society Forums

Does marinated chicken cook quicker? Did some at the weekend that seemed to cook way faster than it normally should.

I am sure someone will come up with a technical answer. been marinating for the last couple of years and try to get the chicken done quickly, last batch only took 30 mins!

I can only think of one reason why it might and that would be difference in water content within the muscle fibres. But I wouldn't have thought it would have a significant effect.

I'm not sure what the effect would be either.

Water is a poor conductor of heat but equally its a great convector. As your heat source is coming from the bottom, I could imagine water at the bottom of the chicken heats, becomes less dense and convects through the fibres transferring its energy to the fibres themselves.

Equally though if there's more water in there then it should take more energy to heat (water has SHC of around 4KJ per kg x degrees Celsius which is high).

But to be honest, I can't imagine it would make a massive difference to cook times.

If you inject water into chicken then nuke it, that's damned fast because microwaves agitate the water molecules, but watered down microwave chicken isn't going to get you any calls

In some cases marination with an acidic quality ie lemon, lime or wine can start to breakdown the meat fibres before cooking, but as has ben said I'm not sure that would make that much of a notable difference maybe only a couple of minutes if that.

Very good point Keith, I didn't think about that. But I concur, you'd likely only be talking about a few minutes at most.

Most likely some other variable was not as expected.