Boneless skinless thighs, six of them, in a sauce, low for six hours because that is what the recipe said. They are not raw and they are not exactly tough, but they shred into dry stringy fibres and taste like nothing even though the sauce is good. I thought thighs were supposed to be forgiving. Am I cooking them too long, or is the problem what I am cooking them in?
The other half of your problem is the tasting like nothing. Long cooking in liquid leaches flavour out of the meat and into the sauce, which is fine when the sauce is the point, and less fine when you want to taste chicken.
Browning the thighs hard in a pan first makes a big difference, and so does salting them 30 minutes ahead. A dry surface and real colour before they go in gives you something that survives four hours in liquid.
If your reason for six hours is that you leave for work, do the whole dish without the chicken, keep it warm, and stir shredded cooked chicken in when you get home. Not elegant, but it beats eight hours of dry fibres and it still counts as dinner making itself.
Worth checking whether your cooker runs hot as well. If low on your machine is really a gentle simmer rather than the 85 to 90C it should be, everything overcooks faster than the recipe expects. Water test it for four hours and see what you have.
Newer machines especially. Mine reaches a proper simmer on low within two hours, which is nothing like the older one it replaced, and every recipe I had learned suddenly overcooked.
Thighs also vary a lot by size now. The big ones sold in a tray are nearly double what a recipe from a decade ago assumed, so timings written for smaller pieces do not translate cleanly. Weigh them once and you will see what I mean.
@braise_and_sear · last mo. · 3 replies
Too long. Thighs are forgiving compared with breast, but they are not beef chuck, and six hours on low is well past where they are best.
Boneless thighs in a sauce are done at about three to four hours on low, or roughly two on high. Past that the muscle fibres keep squeezing out moisture and you get exactly what you describe, meat that shreds but is dry, which is a different thing from meat that pulls apart and is juicy.
Three fixes:
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@mise_en_mess · last mo.
The bone in point is underrated. Same cooking time, noticeably better result, and the sauce gets a richness you cannot fake with boneless thighs and a stock cube.
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@visible_stitch · last mo.
Three and a half hours on low is where mine land too. At that point it stops being a leave it all day recipe and becomes a start it at lunchtime recipe, which is worth knowing before you plan your week around it.
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