Roast Chicken
May. 30th, 2010 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deaneI know that it seems like the only thing in my life right now is food, but that's not the case. I also have geocaching. Unfortunately geocaching is like billiards insofar as it's fun to do but not a lot of fun to talk about. So food it is.
In going through the Raichlen book one of the ingredients which appears with alarming frequency is chicken stock. While I could make a chicken stock substitute using bouillon cubes I think that would cause Raichlen to spin in his grave, and I don't think he's even dead yet. Besides, he provides his own recipe for chicken stock so if I want to get the flavour right I should really use his stock.
A key ingredient in chicken stock is, OMG, chicken. More specifically, chicken carcasses, the bits left over after you've scraped everything edible off of the poor bird. Raichlen talks about how he always has carcasses left over from cooking so my first thought was to flip forward through High-Flavor Low-Fat Cooking to the section on poultry and make up a chicken dish or two so that I'd have enough leftovers for making stock. Unfortunately, none of the chicken recipes in Raichlen's book call for whole chickens, and several of them even require chicken stock, leading to a sort of chicken-and-stock recursion that made my head ache. I don't know where Raichlen is getting his chicken carcasses from, but it's not from cooking the recipes in his own book.
So I did what I always do in these situations -- Googled for "roast chicken recipe" -- and settled on Jamie Oliver's Perfect Roast Chicken.
The recipe is dead simple to make and fast, primarily because Oliver doesn't bother to peel any of the vegetables. Wash 'em, chop 'em, drizzle 'em with oil and you're done. At first this struck me as odd. Did that mean that the vegetables were just to add flavour to the bird, not for final consumption? Then I remembered that Oliver is a food activist who wants people to start cooking healthier meals. Part of that activism is to keep the skins on many vegetables as they contain a lot of the nutrients.
This is the first time that I've attempted a recipe off of Oliver's site. Based on this one experience my impression is that his instructions are not well suited for neophyte cooks. For example, his brief instructions on preparing the chicken say nothing about washing it out with cold water. My mother tells me that poultry should always be washed before preparation. Did Oliver just not bother to mention that, assuming that everyone knows it, or does he think that washing is unnecessary.
Similarly, when he says to put the chicken into the pan he doesn't say whether the breast should be up or down. Faced with a simple binary decision I can always be counted on to get it wrong. I put the chicken breast-down, thinking that it would pick up more flavour from the vegetables below. The result was a roasted chicken with beautiful, golden-brown skin on its back and pale, rubbery skin on its chest. The breast meat was quite juicy, though, so perhaps cooking it breast-down helped.
Both the chicken and the roasted vegetables were tasty, but to my palette the vegetables and seasonings didn't seem to make much of an impression on the meat. It just tasted like regular roast chicken to me. Fortunately I like regular roast chicken and between the paramour and I we polished off the entire bird.
I've got a second chicken in the fridge which I'll cook up in the next couple of days. After that I should have enough chicken carcasses to make stock.
In going through the Raichlen book one of the ingredients which appears with alarming frequency is chicken stock. While I could make a chicken stock substitute using bouillon cubes I think that would cause Raichlen to spin in his grave, and I don't think he's even dead yet. Besides, he provides his own recipe for chicken stock so if I want to get the flavour right I should really use his stock.
A key ingredient in chicken stock is, OMG, chicken. More specifically, chicken carcasses, the bits left over after you've scraped everything edible off of the poor bird. Raichlen talks about how he always has carcasses left over from cooking so my first thought was to flip forward through High-Flavor Low-Fat Cooking to the section on poultry and make up a chicken dish or two so that I'd have enough leftovers for making stock. Unfortunately, none of the chicken recipes in Raichlen's book call for whole chickens, and several of them even require chicken stock, leading to a sort of chicken-and-stock recursion that made my head ache. I don't know where Raichlen is getting his chicken carcasses from, but it's not from cooking the recipes in his own book.
So I did what I always do in these situations -- Googled for "roast chicken recipe" -- and settled on Jamie Oliver's Perfect Roast Chicken.
The recipe is dead simple to make and fast, primarily because Oliver doesn't bother to peel any of the vegetables. Wash 'em, chop 'em, drizzle 'em with oil and you're done. At first this struck me as odd. Did that mean that the vegetables were just to add flavour to the bird, not for final consumption? Then I remembered that Oliver is a food activist who wants people to start cooking healthier meals. Part of that activism is to keep the skins on many vegetables as they contain a lot of the nutrients.
This is the first time that I've attempted a recipe off of Oliver's site. Based on this one experience my impression is that his instructions are not well suited for neophyte cooks. For example, his brief instructions on preparing the chicken say nothing about washing it out with cold water. My mother tells me that poultry should always be washed before preparation. Did Oliver just not bother to mention that, assuming that everyone knows it, or does he think that washing is unnecessary.
Similarly, when he says to put the chicken into the pan he doesn't say whether the breast should be up or down. Faced with a simple binary decision I can always be counted on to get it wrong. I put the chicken breast-down, thinking that it would pick up more flavour from the vegetables below. The result was a roasted chicken with beautiful, golden-brown skin on its back and pale, rubbery skin on its chest. The breast meat was quite juicy, though, so perhaps cooking it breast-down helped.
Both the chicken and the roasted vegetables were tasty, but to my palette the vegetables and seasonings didn't seem to make much of an impression on the meat. It just tasted like regular roast chicken to me. Fortunately I like regular roast chicken and between the paramour and I we polished off the entire bird.
I've got a second chicken in the fridge which I'll cook up in the next couple of days. After that I should have enough chicken carcasses to make stock.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-31 08:06 pm (UTC)Also, breast-down is the current trend, for more tender breasts (one presumes the fat gets pulled down by gravity or something, who knows), though some of my foodie friends do breast-down until the last 20 minutes and then flip the bird so the breast gets a little browner.
I use one of these to make roast chicken, because it's how my mother taught me. She also taught me to grab whatever sauce or salad dressing from the fridge that needed to be used up and slather it on there first. Comes out great every time. Whenever one of mine gets old or gnarly, I ask her for another one, because she gets them for pennies, new in their boxes, at yard sales.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-31 08:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-02 05:25 pm (UTC)I did up another roast chicken last night. Since the breast meat came out so tender and juicy last time, I put the chicken breast-down again this time, turning it over just for the last 10 minutes. That still wasn't enough time to crisp the breast skin so next time I'll try turning it over for the last 15 minutes.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-31 09:54 pm (UTC)My dad used to get a presentation similar to Serene's device using a half-empty can of beer and very little more, roasted on a grill (although I think it works as well in the oven) and it is beyond awesome and an amusing conversation piece to boot. http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Beer-Butt-Chicken/Detail.aspx