How to Cut Chicken Breast: Against the Grain?

While most people know and understand that you should cut steak against the grain to tenderize the meat, not many people realize that you can do the same thing with Chicken breast.

The reason it’s more pronounced on beef is because beef has a close-grained, dense texture where-as chicken has a relatively porous texture.

The color of chicken also makes it rather difficult to visualize the grain direction; Raw chicken appears glass-like, where-as raw beef is hues of purple, red, and brown.

The short of it: In my opinion, it doesn’t matter how you cut the chicken breast. Assuming you didn’t overcook it, it will be tender and juicy regardless of how you orient your knife.

What is Meat “Grain”?

Before I demonstrate how to slice chicken breast, it’s beneficial to understand what grain is with respect to meat. This way you can go about slicing other meats as effectively.

A more optimal word for “meat” is muscle.

Meat muscle is made of muscle fibers that are bundled together by connective tissues. These muscle fibers are comprised of filaments that are arranged in a repetitive pattern alongside other myofibrils.

The direction in which these long strands of muscle fibers form is the “grain” direction; This is the direction these muscles contract.

You can think of this in a similar vein to the wood or lumber industry. The “grain” describes the growth pattern of the tree.

Identifying the Grain Direction of Chicken Breast

The reason it can be sort of be hard to visualize the grain direction of chicken breast is due to its color; Raw chicken breast has a light pink/glass-like quality.

When looking closer, it’s readily apparent that there are indeed muscle fibers and a grain direction.

An issue with this grain though is that it isn’t uniform. Rather, the grain will “fan out” and curve.

Here’s an example of a chicken breast:

Note: All of my chicken breasts are flattened with a meat mallet.

In dotted white line is roughly the grain:

Note: I did my best to roughly outline the grain direction.

As you can probably guess, this makes it somewhat hard to cut exactly against the grain because your knife doesn’t curve.

How to Cut Chicken Breast

There are really two ways you can approach slicing chicken breast:

1. The “Optimal” Way (against the grain-ish)
2. The Realistic Way(s)

This article explores both.

Also, for the sake of the article, the chicken was cooked without seasoning.

The Optimal Way to Slice Chicken Breast: Against the Grain

When looking at chicken breast you can see the musculature has a white tendon that runs through it.

Here’s a picture of what I’m referring to:

This “white string” as some people call it, is actually a tendon. The tendon is a form of connective tissue that attaches the skeletal muscle (the breast or pectoralis muscle) to the bone.

At this tendon is where the grain “shifts” or “fans out” on chicken breast.

Rather than attempting to slice the chicken breast whole and compensating for the angle (a near impossibility), you can simply slice the breast in half at this tendon after cooking:

By doing this, I can look at the cross section or a reference photo (above) to see what the grain looked like.

After separating the two pieces, you can attempt to cut along their respective grain.

Here’s these pieces post-slicing:

I then applied slight horizontal outward pressure to tear the meat apart:

As we can see, the meat naturally teared across it’s grain.

I could of definitely sliced more optimally but again your knife isn’t a fluid object. All you can do is do your best to orient it roughly against the grain.

The Realistic Method for Slicing Chicken Breast

To preface:

Chicken breast has a relatively loose grain structure – this is the reason chicken breast is cooked to 165F – which is for pathogen lethality; Or it’s cooked with certain time-temperature specificity (pg 37.).

Pathogens are capable of completely penetrating these muscle tissues where-as with beef – which is close grained – the pathogens aren’t capable of penetrating deep into the muscle, which is why the outside is seared and you can enjoy medium-rare steak.

The only reason I bring the above up is because in most cases it doesn’t really matter how you slice chicken breast; Even if you were to slice with the grain, most people wouldn’t bat an eye.

Note: This article is actually part of a series of tests I’ve been doing to gauge my internal temperature preference. From the USDA guidelines linked above, I’ve done 145F for 10 minutes, 150F for 3 minutes, 154F for 1 minute, 157F for 31 seconds, and 165F for 0 seconds.

My preference is 154F for 1 minute – which is as pictured in this article.

I find the meat is juicy, has no pink, and some texture in the mouth; Going lower results in some pink, it’s juicy, and has a strange homogenous mouthfeel; Going higher than 154F gets progressively more stringy, dry, and mealy.

With that said, you can slice horizontally or vertically, it doesn’t really matter.

Here’s a chicken breast cut in half:

I then cut vertically and horizontally on the two halves.

Here’s the individual slices:

Applying slight horizontal outward pressure to see where the fibers would break:

The pieces were chosen at random. As we can see from the tears, some are against the grain, while others lie horizontal – this is simply a consequence of the grain structure curving.

However, the pieces were still tender in the mouth regardless of the slice. Meaning, it doesn’t really matter how you choose to slice chicken breast.

You can do:

• With the grain,
• Against the grain,
• either option on a bias,
• either option sliced vertically

The above are my thoughts and opinions after repeating this test for roughly 10 chicken breasts.