Bacon Wrapped Chicken

It’s so juicy and moist, but still cooked through! How’d you do it?

A friend after sampling a batch.

Obligatory story before the recipe like all those other cooking websites run by wine moms with too much to do.

Or not enough to do, idk man. Don’t these people have lives? Kids? Where do they find the time to write this stuff? Am I just bad at time management? Is that why I don’t have time to write a cooking bl-… oh. Wait. Darn. I’m writing a cooking blog. I’m an idiot.

Musings aside, this is a recipe I originally found online and have since tweaked a bit (more garlic makes everything better.) This recipe makes sweet and savory chicken breasts, perfect to pair with some potatoes, broccoli, or pretty much whatever. This is a crowd-pleaser, and they reheat excellently in the oven later on. My lovely girlfriend has dubbed them, “very gourmet.”

Everett Has Conducted Research

This recipe has caused me to do research. I can hear you asking, “Everett, research on what? Pray do tell us this knowledge you’ve acquired.” Well, my willing student, I’m glad you asked. Your thirst for knowledge will serve you well in this life.
Anyway, yes, the research. This recipe has us cooking two different meats, the chicken and the bacon. If you’re like me, you like your bacon more on the crispy side, and to cook bacon, you need higher temperatures. However, the chicken is wrapped in the bacon, and if you were to cook everything at the temperature you’d normally need to get the bacon nice and crispy, you will either not cook the chicken properly (bad), or burn the bacon (worse, a crime).

Solving the Crispy-Bacon Problem with SCIENCE

How do we solve this? We want a crispy, (or crispy-ish, I don’t care how you like your bacon) outer layer and a juicy, moist interior. This is quite the quandary, but never fear, my dear student, we have ✨solutions.✨ For these solutions, however, we’ll need to learn a thing or two about thermodynamics.

You’ve likely heard the words conduction and convection, especially if you’ve bought (or like me, sold) an oven. I’ll explain what these are since they’re important for our understanding of thermodynamics (trust me you’re gonna LEARN here.)

I’ll explain it like an article I read:

1. Conduction is when your lover’s body is pressed against yours.
2. Convection is when your lover blows in your ear.

This is a… um… steamy (see what I did there? HA!) way of describing it, but it’s not wrong. Conduction involves energy transfer from direct contact with the energy source (those grill marks on your hot dog or that burn on your hand from touching the stove? Conduction, baby.) Convection is when the energy is carried by a fluid (fluids being air, water, or oil.)

Heat in the… Bacon Sheets?

Next, we’re going to explain a bit about heat and temperature. Your beautiful bacon babies are going to be cooked by a transfer of energy. Everything is cooked by stuffing it full of that good-good energy. As you know from personal experience, air is significantly less dense than steel, iron, or any other cooking surface. Or walls. Walls are denser than air. The density of something generally determines its ability to transfer heat, since heat is energy and energy is electrons bouncing around like an ADHD kid in karate class that isn’t getting noticed by the instructor.

In this recipe, we’re wrapping chicken in bacon. If you’ve done it correctly, the chicken should be snugly contained within the bacon, which means the chicken will only be cooked by the conduction of heat building up on the bacon and transferring into the chicken. That’s why pan-frying this recipe would be difficult since you’d burn the bacon before the chicken cooked.

All this new knowledge we’ve acquired is important for developing those ✨solutions✨ I mentioned earlier. The first solution: make sure your bacon is wrapped tightly around your chicken. If you have space in between the bacon and the chicken, you’ll lose some of the heat transfer into your chicken and it won’t cook as well. The second solution has us asking an important question: What’s the thermal conductivity of bacon?

Answer: I’ve got no clue. Solution? Don’t use thick-cut bacon because it’ll absorb too much heat and your chicken won’t properly cook in the times I’ve provided. Also don’t use those cheaper “miss-cut” bacon packs you find at Lidl or Aldi because they’re inconsistently cut and will transfer heat funky.

If you use turkey bacon…

sigh

Heaven help us all.

Why You’ve Been Given This Knowledge

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed your lesson in thermodynamics. These skills will help you troubleshoot because everyone’s oven and pans are different. I use a convection oven with USA Pan steel baking sheets. Technically, all ovens cook by convection, but a “convection oven” has extra heat sources and fans that will drive airflow through the oven rather than letting things heat normally. Convection ovens get the heat to the food more efficiently and likewise cook quicker.

What You’re Gonna Need

• 4 chicken breasts 
• 12 slices of bacon (Not thick cut)
• ¼ cup brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon paprika
• 1 tablespoon garlic powder
• 1 tablespoon onion powder
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon chopped parsley
• ½ teaspoon MSG (optional, but good)
• ½ teaspoon white pepper (also optional, I like it but it’s not for everyone)

How To Do It

1. Get started by preheating your oven to between 375 – 400 degrees F. If you’re using a traditional oven or your chicken breasts are larger than they should be, crank that baby to 400.

2. Mix your brown sugar, smoked paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, and black pepper. (Mix in your white pepper and MSG as well if you’re using either or both of them.) This is your spice rub. If you pre-make this without the brown sugar, it’s actually an incredible mixture. I’ll keep a jar full of it and throw it on other things, potatoes, eggs, you name it. It’s great. Use it as an exfoliating rub for all I care. (please don’t)

3. Rub half of this onto your chicken breasts. Make sure the chicken is thoroughly covered. You’re not looking to bury it in the rub, but you do want to ensure that all parts of the meat are similarly covered.
4. Wrap each of your chicken breasts in three pieces of bacon. I like to use applewood or hickory smoked bacon but use your preference. Just make sure it’s not thick-cut.
   1. Keep in mind you want to tightly wrap the chicken, but don’t want to overlap too much bacon, since it’ll mess up heat transfer and you’ll have weird cook times. I like to wrap two pieces around the bacon and then take the third and wrap it over the top to cover both of the long ends, but do what you want and experiment!

5. Place the beauties with the seam downwards on a baking pan or skillet.
   1. Note that steel can be more dense than iron (if the steel is an alloy it could be a few hundred k/m3 less dense, meaning less heat transfer yada yada) so your cooking times might fluctuate.

6. Now that you’ve wrapped your birds in the bacon, use the remaining spice rub to coat them. Rub them down so you evenly coat the tops and sides, just be careful not to let the bacon unwrap! I’d recommend not removing them from the pan/sheet once you’ve put them down. The results are generally not conducive to bacon-staying-in-place.

7. Bake these for between 25-30 minutes.

8. Remove from the oven, sprinkle with parsley, and enjoy!

Extra Tips:

1. I cannot stress enough how simple this is if you have an instant thermometer. If you’ve got one, just check the chicken after the first 20 or so minutes. Check the internal temperature in the thickest part of the chicken. If it reaches 160 F, pull it. The recommended safe temperature for chicken is 165 F, and if you pull the chicken at 160 F it will hit that 165 F mark while it rests on the pan.

2. If you want to crisp up the bacon a little bit more (you know you do), then kick your broiler on for the last 1-2 minutes of cooking.

3. The mixture generally makes a nice sauce in the pan after and during the cook. Baste them boyos in that stuff, it’s SO GOOD (and sugary. It’s sugar. But it’s so good.)