Page 64 - Barbecue Chicken Made Easy

If dry-brining a whole bird, concentrate more salt on the thicker parts, like the thighs, and less on the leaner parts, like the breast and back. Bonus: Dry-brining helps poultry skin crisp up.
How long do you need to brine? Salt is a slow poke and creeps slowly through the thicket of muscle fibers. How long should the meat be in the brine? Here are some rules of thumb, not precise. Use them for wet or dry brining, and always brine in the refrigerator.
1⁄2 inch thick meat: about 1⁄2 hour 1 inch thick meat: about 1 hour
2 inch thick meat: about 4 hours 3 inch thick meat: about 12 hours
The good news is that salt continues to migrate throughout the meat during cooking and does so slightly faster due to the heat.
Brinerades
This fact always shocks people: Marinades rarely penetrate chicken more than 1/8 inch. The molecules are just too large. Salt is only two atoms, but sucrose (sugar) is 43 atoms. Likewise, garlic, onion, pepper, etc. are all too large.
And for sure, oil in a marinade doesn’t penetrate because oil and water don’t mix and remember, meat is mostly water. Here is a