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 ti...
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...
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...
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, beca...
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...
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 ou...
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 shoul...
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-...
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 singl...
There's a passage in Anthony Bourdain's book of bistro recipes, Les Halles , that goes something like this: "If you can't roast a chicken, you are a sorry, incompetent idiot who should dig his own grave." Apparently, roasting a chicken should be marvelously easy: throw salt and pepper on that bad boy, put into the oven, and out comes a crisp-skinned, succulent, juicy, hot dinner, twice as...