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 p...
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.
Bu...
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 KitchenThe flavor of natural roasting juices...can...
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...
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 thr...
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 alo...
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...
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. ...
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.€..
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...
