Grilling greatness

Secrets to the most irresistible chicken

Grilled chicken thighs and corn with lime-basil butter. Paying attention to the meat’s color on the grill is critical. You want it chestnut in color.

Grilled chicken thighs with tomatoes. Slashing chicken thighs to the bone encourages heat to penetrate, so the meat cooks through before the skin burns.

Chicken thighs and tomatoes on the grill. You don’t have to be a professional cook to make great grilled chicken, whether bone-in or boneless. Kate Sears/The New York Times photos

Grilling dogma dictates that you shouldn’t move meat at all when it’s over the coals. While this advice prevents sticking, tearing and juice loss, those in the trade know that blindly adhering to it eliminates the possibility of a layered crust — and the potential for greatness.

You don’t have to be a professional cook to make irresistible grilled chicken, whether bone-in or boneless. At a carnal level, we all have grill intuition: Our eyes, nose and appetite compel us to turn, flip and plate.

What follows is a guide to applying those instincts at the right moment and not before (or after), and many of the lessons apply more broadly to all kinds of meat.

Start with the basics: Heat the grill, clean the grates, place the meat and don’t touch it until it has a confident color and releases graciously. Despite best efforts, some meats never come up without fuss, so use an upturned fish spatula to lift rather than tug on any sticky areas for the first move. Then switch to tongs for the fun part: rotating.

Rotate and rotate again: You’ve probably noticed the crosshatch marks on those juicy sirloins and pieces of chicken in TV ads. Their angles are for vanity, but the extra grill marks are for flavor (more color means more flavor). You want a spectrum of color, from golden to chestnut with some dark dots. With their longer cook time, larger or bone-in cuts give you plenty of opportunity to cultivate this kind of crust, allowing more time to rotate them before they’re cooked. But even one rotation, as you get with smaller, boneless cuts, will do.

Use hot and cool spots to your advantage: If a piece of meat is developing too much color but isn’t yet cooked through, move it to a cooler area of the grill or turn down the temperature. If the crust is looking a little sad, but you know the meat is almost cooked, show it intense heat.

Give each chicken breast or thigh exactly what it needs: Follow your instincts. Just because a recipe says place, then flip your chicken thighs, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t line them up on their sides against one another like dominoes to render fatty pockets. It doesn’t mean you can’t hold a fat-cap to the fire to render and puff.

React to flare-ups rather than avoid rendering fat for fear of flames: If fat flares up when it drips on the coals, remove the meat and spritz the flames with a spray bottle, or just let them dissipate. Then, brush the grates clean and go back to cooking as usual.

Stay with it: Good grilling is a something you will get better at each time you put something on the grates, and no piece of meat will cook in quite the same way. Make your marinade, then put away the recipe and follow your appetite to make each chicken thigh or breast off the grill a crusted delight.