Since it’s too cold out to grill but I haven’t had chicken in a while I got some chicken breasts that I halved to make them thin and some lemon pepper marinade. They are all together sitting in a pyrex dish in the fridge. Can I just throw the whole thing in the oven and bake them that way? Or do I need to get rid of the excess marinade first so they aren’t swimming in it?
How cold is it? It was 10F today and I grilled a hamburger - it worked perfectly fine. I needed to preheat it enough to get the snow off it thought. I know in the past I grilled down till -15F without any issue.
You could leave all that marinade in the dish, but you would likely regret it, IMO. I’m assuming you plan to cover the dish while baking, and with that much liquid involved, you’d be stewing more than baking. Not that there’s anything wrong with stewing, but it takes longer and results in stewed chicken rather than baked chicken. (If you don’t cover the dish, that’s a horrible mess on the inside of the oven waiting to happen.)
Make sure your chicken gets up to 165°F, and you can do whatever you want. But leaving a ton of marinade in the dish sounds like more trouble than you want, IMO.
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Let’s move this to CS (from GQ) since that’s where the food questions go and it’s where all of the foodies hang out.
The proteins that extract into the marinade get kind of weird. They coagulate into little string and balls that look pretty ugly, if the liquid all boils off. They a have a odd texture as well, but don’t really cause any harm.
I’d also wonder what you hope to gain by leaving all the marinade in the dish? It should have done it’s job by now. You’re better of draining the excess and letting dry heat do it’s thing.
Wtf? You don’t drain off the excess. Put them on a new pan.
Yes, it will be gross if you just cook the whole thing. And you’ll have a bunch of burned crud all around the dish.
Yeah, if it’s a mild enough marinade I suppose you could toss it all in a frying pan, and cook until the chicken is done, and then pull it out and reduce the marinade to a sauce. But I’d just take the chicken out of the dish and broil it in the oven.
Take a bit of the marinade, put it in a saucepan and heat it up with some butter then use that to baste the chicken as it’s broiling. Really don’t bung it all into the oven, it won’t be yummy. If you can’t fire up the grill (and I don’t know why not, I grill all winter and it’s especially fun in the snow) then go with the next most direct heat method. Third alternative would be browning in a hot skillet then baking until done.
It gets dark a lot earlier in winter. I’ve yet to find a good light to cook by. The steak looks done until you bring it inside & realize it’s barely beyond mooing.
I hear that–I tend to eat early so it’s less of a problem for me but I grill by the flashlight on my phone often enough and that barely mooing issue is solved handily with a digital meat thermometer. Once it gets to 140F it’s good to go by my estimation.
Well, I ended up baking it as is. Chicken cooked fine but it was kind of tasteless. The marinade never really permeated the chicken like I hoped it would.
Didn’t grill outside since the patio has about 6 inches of snow on it, the grill is is covered and bungeed for the season, and it was about 5 degrees out.
Marinades really don’t penetrate all that far. IIRC, even after days of marination, a marinade only gets something like 1/4 inch into the meat. (Actually, this cite I just googled up says 1/8 inch.)
Soo, it’s done? 
(I’m a fan of blue and rare steaks if you couldn’t tell.)
I grill on our porch 12 months out of the year. Cooking steaks and chicken is ideally done by feel. Maybe it’s easier for me; my gf likes her steaks rare and I make mine medium rare, still, it’s done by touch. Chicken I cook medium rare, then move it to a warmed plate and cover with foil for 5 minutes.
So you cooked it right
Buy a reasonable instant read thermometer. They’re not all that expensive. Save yourself the stress of guessing. Yes, you can do it by feel, but it’s completely foolproof with the thermometer and saves any doubt. I’m very much a “cook by feel” person, but when it comes to roasts and steaks, I’ve been converted to the thermometer. Now I never have an overdone or underdone piece of meat (and you can fix underdone, anyway.)
Eh, I don’t want to climb up my icey steps, clear the snow off my patio, and then stand in the cold while my food cooks. Grilling is sitting I do when it’s pleasant to rest in the hammock while i wait for my food to be done.
I hate hate hate the cold. Come October, the grill gets 99% shut down. This year it looks like it will be sunny enough and above freezing so that I can cook our standing rib roast outside on Sunday, mostly to free up the oven for other things. But other than large special occassion meals, the grills chill (pun intended) until April. It is not especially fun in the snow. It is especially UNFUN!
ETA: Instant read thermometers are great. Remote thermometers are even better, especially ones that can measure both grill and meat temps.
correction: “Grilling is something I …”