Pollo al Mattone (Chicken Under a Brick)

We've been serving this to guests recently after a long period of making it for ourselves to get it right. It's frigging amazingly flavorful and delicious, in addition to being simple. There are a lot of recipes online about how to do this to an entire chicken, but this recipe calls for breasts, and I find they're a lot easier to deal with. This recipe is adapted from Steve Raichlen's How to Grill.

Gather these things:

2-4 boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 tsp coarse salt (we prefer Kosher)
1 tsp fresh ground pepper
1 tsp hot pepper flakes (less if you're sensitive to that sort of thing)
1 Tbsp chopped garlic (or just press a couple cloves)
1 Tbsp chopped fresh rosemary
1 lemon
1/4 cup EV olive oil

You'll also want to wrap a brick in foil for each breast.

Do this:

Trim any excess fat from chx breasts, rinse and pat dry with a paper towel and place in whatever you're marinating in (we use a smallish ceramic casserole dish). Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and pepper flakes on both sides. Rub garlic and rosemary into both sides. Squeeze lemon juice over them and pour the olive oil on and stick 'em in the fridge for 30 mins to an hour.

Light your grill and get it real hot. You're going to be cooking directly over the heat; I usually pile the coals up in an even layer on one side of the grill, leaving at least a third with no coals so I have a cooler place to move them to if I need to. Brush and oil the grate thoroughly right before you put the chicken on.

When you're ready to cook, toss wood chips on if you're using them (they will up the flavor, but we've made them without wood chips and they were still amazing). Arrange the breasts at a 45 degree angle to the grill grates and put a foil wrapped brick on each one (I usually have the bricks on the grill for a few minutes prior to get them warmed up). Cover and cook for two minutes. Rotate each breast 90 degrees and replace the brick and cook for two minutes more. Flip and repeat. Each breast cooks for 4-6 mins per side. You should have beautiful golden breasts with a good crosshatch grill mark pattern. I always check them with a digital thermometer and if they need to go longer I put them on the cool side and cover the grill and just let them bake a little rather than stay directly over the searing coals. At 145 degrees F get them off the grill and loosely tent with foil to let them rest for a few minutes. This is a great opportunity to toast some bread or grill a veggie side to complete the whole meal on the grill. We like to do grilled zucchini and red onion tossed in a lemon/basil vinaigrette.

Enjoy! You can do this without the bricks, and it's still good, but something about the brick pressing down on them really adds a lot of flavor, and you've probably got a few bricks laying around anyway. That's it. This is the best grilled chicken breasts we've done.

Cheers