Content about Chicken
October 19, 2011
The Paupered Chef officially endorses the convenient practice.
I, Nick Kindelsperger, wholeheartedly endorse the practice of freezing chicken stock in ice cube trays. Doing so allows one to crack them into zip-lock bags and stash them in the freezer for safe keeping. It is convenient, fairly easy to do, and downright practical (in a slightly embarrassing way). Of course, the problem with dishing out little kitchen tips and tricks like this one is that there are enough of them to make even the most...
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July 22, 2011
No offense, but you're probably doing it wrong
There's a lot of misconception when it comes to "barbecue." The problem is the word itself. It's used as a synonym for grilling, refers to the grill itself, or to the meat being grilled; it also has a sauce named after it; and sometimes it's just the word for the party itself held outdoors in somebody's backyard. What, actually, is "barbecue"?
American purists see things a little differently. To them...
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March 4, 2011
Our friends over at Serious Eats have put together a slide show of America's top fried chicken joints. Predictably, most of them are in the South. Now, they just need to do a chicken and waffles list...
Our Favorite Fried Chicken in America
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January 25, 2011
What's your favorite way?
Having roasted many, many chickens in my cooking life, I've come to the opinion that there is no way to roast a chicken without some kind of opinion. You may get away with tossing an untrussed chicken into the oven with a shower of salt, maybe a lemon in the cavity, and calling it dinner, pretending to be as careless as possible. But that's still an opinion. So is planning days ahead of time brining it and messing around with...
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November 8, 2010
Thailand-style fried chicken
The crackliest chicken you can imagine.
I caught your attention with that title, didn't I? Well, the same thing happened to me, when I stumbled on a recipe in The Atlantic.com's food section in a post about Bangkok street vendor fried chicken--the recipe for which the author cajoled from the street vendor, then scaled down for use in the kitchen. And yes, he called it better than Southern fried chicken here in the U.S.
Bangkok is...
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Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.
"Dinner Tonight" Column
QUICK MEALS TO YOUR TABLE FIVE DAYS A WEEK.
Chicken with Tomato-Saffron Vinaigrette with Mixed Greens
Paprika and saffron help give a vivid orange-red tinge and a round, mellow flavor to this simple summer salad.
Summer Succotash with Bacon
Lovely, lovely bacon fat and a shot of sherry vinegar...
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What if there was a method for making stock that not only dispensed with the time-consuming part, but also produced something that tasted better?
In practice, significantly more flavor is extracted from the meat. [...] When combined with good ingredients, these factors produce remarkable stocks in significantly less time.
-Heston Blumenthal, The Fat Duck Cookbook
I started making stock when I realized that you could stash the carcasses from roast chickens in the freezer and save them up for an empty Sunday and a few hours of simmering. That certainly got me past the cost...
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June 1, 2010
Tackling Mexico's national dish
You can shave truffles over a dish and call it special, but it's not; it's just expensive.
- Rick Bayless
I've been a fan of Rick Bayless since this blog started over four years ago, but it wasn't until he blurted out the above statement during the Top Chef Masters finale last year that I really figured out why. I already knew that I loved so many Mexican dishes because they balanced fat with acid, and layered spices...
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May 10, 2010
Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.
"Dinner Tonight" Column
QUICK MEALS TO YOUR TABLE FIVE DAYS A WEEK.
Dinner Tonight: Spaghetti with Bottarga and Almonds
Bottarga is the secret ingredient for this incredibly simple pasta.
Merguez Sausage with Collards and Couscous
This is definitely not your usual Southern version of collard greens. Here the hearty vegetable is paired...
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February 24, 2010
How to save the oyster while cutting up chicken.
The chicken oyster. It sounds strange. But also intriguing enough to suggest deliciousness. I've heard other people talk about this elusive piece of meat hidden somewhere on the chicken. Only smart cooks know about it, like Thomas Keller, who mentions it in his recipe for "My Favorite Simple Roast Chicken" in the Bouchon cookbook. When the chicken is done roasting, the skin golden and fragrant, he locates the oyster on each...
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Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.
"Dinner Tonight" Column
Quick meals to your table five days a week.
Stuffed Chicken Cutlet With Ham, Cheese, and Sauerkraut
A breaded chicken cutlet, oozing provolone cheese between a layer of ham and tangy sauerkraut. What's not to like?
Beginner Almond Shrimp Curry with Tomatoes
New to curry? Even though this recipe is easy, it doesn't taste like something...
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November 18, 2009
Perhaps the best way to cook chicken.
In my opinion, the best chicken is chicken sous-vide. Each bite is tender and succulent in a way I never thought chicken could possibly be. It's kind of changed everything for me. Even the appearance of the meat is different, instead of stringy and tough, a fork can simply cut through the meat. It's enough to make anyone convert.
So for the past few weeks I've been proselytizing about the powers of sous-vide, a...
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October 7, 2009
Some tricks to improve this classic soup.
It's cold season, and everyone's coming down with something. Chicken soup is a nourishing potion, one that seems almost automatic even though I've never really questioned why. Most of the time this tradition involves nothing more than opening a can of Campbell's chicken noodle soup: somehow those minuscule pellets of chicken and mushy noodles are okay once your temperature is above 100.
But when my sick wife had...
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August 10, 2009
How the most chickeny chicken dish imaginable.
Every morning we would roast thirty-six chickens just for their juices, rather than for the meat...Thirty-six chicken provided enough juices for thirty portions of freshly cooked chicken. In other words, the customer had the juice of more than one whole chicken accompanying his dish...It was extreme.
- Marco Pierre White, Devil in the Kitchen
The flavor of natural roasting juices...cannot be surpassed.
- James Peterson, Sauces
I...
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July 14, 2009
There's more than one way to grill a chicken.
Cooking chicken satay at a July 4th cookout is, I admit, a little odd. It's especially so if you consider that my wife and I subjected our parents and grandparents to the ordeal. While everyone else around the country casually flipped hamburgers and hot dogs, I rounded up everyone available to help me skewer tiny pieces of highly marinated chicken onto wooden skewers. That marinade also happened to have loads of...
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June 3, 2009
The spiciest way to grill your chicken.
My first bite of jerk chicken, fresh from two hours of mingling with smoke, was everything I wanted it to be. The rub of allspice berries and black peppercorns mixed with fresh ginger and thyme and created this incredible aroma --one that I couldn't help but adore. I was completely happy and content until quickly, and without much warning, the spice hit. A double dose of habanero cut through all of that complexity,...
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March 10, 2009
What Nick cooks when he feels nostalgic for simplicity.
I think part of the reason I took a break from roast chicken was the rising absurdity of my preparations. A few years ago I had chased after juicy meat and crispy skin, by trying various combinations of slow roasting, extreme slow roasting, experiments with baking soda, and high, high heat. The results were often spectacular, if never quite practical. And somewhere along the line the game lost its fun.
What...
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March 3, 2009
My wife has been bugging me for months now to make tamales, and it's always been the next project, the one I'll do after I finish whatever I'm doing at the moment. When that time comes I've usually forgotten about them and have moved onto something else. Truthfully, I didn't see much of a rush. I love tamales, but I can indulge in them whenever I'd like around my neighborhood. The possibilities are endless: I can...
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I can't remember exactly where the conversation began, or why we suddenly started talking about New Orleans, but for about 5 minutes last Friday Night I waxed poetic about the Crescent City. My interest has been explored before, but apparently my chatter seemed especially interesting that night. I suppose I could have been because my friend Hal had never been, and I took umbrage. It was late, and alcohol was slightly involved...
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April 16, 2008
A few months ago I was wandering the poultry aisle at my food coop looking at the bewildering number of options for a roasting chicken. As the words free-range and humane--proclaimed on every package--began to lose their meaning, I came across a pile of frozen, gangly-looking birds with their long necks still intact. The label, announcing this new product, read “Amish stewing hens.” “Great for stock!”...
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April 9, 2008
In the midst of deep frying chicken last week I dreamt of Loretta Lynn. This happens only occasionally, and usually is musical in nature, but this time I had an image of her pan frying chicken in a large iron skillet. Sure enough, I found some rather hilarious commercials of her pawning Crisco on YouTube. How wonderful, I thought, that the amazing country singer never had to worry about dealing with large quantities of...
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April 2, 2008
I am not sure where these urges come from, but last week I just had to have fried chicken. For no obvious reason, I dreamt of perfectly crunchy batter and moist meat. This was all quite odd. I’ve got enough roast chickens stuck in my head around to keep me occupied for months. But fried chicken? I can't even remember the last piece of fried chicken I'd ever had.
Instead of heading over to the local fast...
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March 25, 2008
My friend Matt's email arrived in my inbox, forthright and serious.
"This coming Saturday, March 22, a turducken will be assembled and cooked in my apartment...in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn. Beginning at about 12 or 12:30, the birds will be deboned, the stuffing will be made, and the ingredients layered and sewn up...resulting in the creation of a delicious culinary grotesque."
Its candidness was matched only by...
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February 29, 2008
As a cook, I've been rather reluctant to prepare homemade stock. I give the usual litany of excuses: too much hassle, not enough time, not cost-effective. I keep a little jar of Better than Bouillon in my fridge door (one chicken, one beef, one vegetable) and I've always got instant stock whenever I need it, in small quantities or large. I don't have to worry about it going off, because the jar lasts, like, a year, and...
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February 7, 2008
Sometimes I can’t even follow my own train of thought. I was buying some butcher's twine at a kitchen supply store because I figured it was time to learn how to truss a chicken. I had skated around the issue for a year or so because Barbara Kafka had told me not to worry about it. She said it was unnecessary and even detrimental to the cooking process. But maybe that was just for her high heat method. Thomas...
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November 26, 2007
Manhattan. 1 day. 9 Restaurants.
I hadn’t been to New York since my exodus in July and I returned with a plan. I wasn’t going to waste any moment visiting attractions, or seeing a Broadway play. I lived there for two years, so it felt right to walk back in and get to what I spent most of my time doing: eating. And with the Paupered Chefs reunited for the first time in half a year, it really wasn't that hard for our minds to go racing all...
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September 9, 2007
I’ve been gathering cook books by whatever method I can...and beggers usually can’t be choosers. I borrow nearly anything I can lay my hands on. I owe lots of money to the library. And whenever I get to head home I usually make it out with an armful books my mom hoarded over the years ( I promise I’ll return them!). One of those was The Louisville Courier-Journal Cookbook. By all stereotypes, it...
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September 3, 2007
I’m not sure why I never thought of this technique before. The biggest problem I have with most of the chickens I roast is that the white and dark meat are done at different times. It’s the great paradox of whole roasted chickens: they should probably be roasted separately. To get the dark meat done I usually have to dry out the white, or dig into a wing when I know it probably should have another 10 minutes in the...
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August 22, 2007
I eat a lot of tacos. I keep a pack of corn tortillas around at all times. Thanks to folks like Rick Bayless, I’ve even branched out to mushroom and swiss chard tacos, huevos rancheros, shrimp, and the granddaddy of them all, our very own Fish Tacos. Glorious, ethereal fish tacos.
This is all rather strange coming from someone who only ate hard shell tacos for the first 16-17 years of his life. Tacos used to mean...
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June 6, 2007
Bushwick, named by the Dutch Boswijk for “town in the woods,” is no longer a town in the woods—it is a rapidly gentrifying section of Brooklyn southeast of tragically hip Williamsburg. Once one of the most blighted areas in town after the blackout lootings of 1977--at that time, it was characterized by empty lots, drugs, and arson, and the majority of residents who could leave, left—it is now an uneasy mix of...
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April 20, 2007
I tend to get caught up on certain cook book authors, and for the past month it has been all about Heston Blumenthal. Head chef at the Fat Duck in the U.K., his cookbook In Search of Perfection has been fostering idea after crazy idea. In a Serious Eats article, we wrote about cooking a pizza on the bottom of a cast iron skillet, to great success. The best part is that his mad-cap search for perfection is, except for a few...
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February 19, 2007
I realize now things have gotten out of control. What started as a simple pursuit to find the ultimate method to roast a chicken has taken up way too much of my time. I like to roast a chicken at least once a week. But this is less a ritual than a weekly torture session. Rather than repeat the same well-worn recipe that has been time-tested and approved, I try something new every single time. I usually sit there...
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All content copyright Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer.
