I recently had occasion to cook a whole flock of roast chickens. I don’t know exactly why; it probably had something to do with Danit’s mentioning that she wanted it. The dish had been relatively unwelcome in my household, though not in my gastrointestinal tract. My wife is a sensitive sort, who feels bad for animals and hates any meat that looks recognizably like one. (She almost wept at Pat Lafrieda’s head-on steer roast at Meatopia. She even feels bad for lobsters.
So I was surprised when she expressed a desire to eat roast chicken, a dish that not only offended her morals, but also her tastes: the biggest issue in our otherwise harmonious union derives from her inexplicable dislike for chicken skin. Yes, yes, I know, it just means I get to eat more skin. But I already get all the chicken skin I can hold. I want her to enjoy it. And yet, perhaps inspired by eating Harold Moore’ legendary roast chicken at Commerce, she asked me to make it, not just for her, but for her friends.
The women came over a few weeks ago, and I made two chickens, which were enormous hits. For one, I used Harold’s method of slipping a big hunk of herb butter under the breast skin; for the other, I just used my old method of pouring olive oil and lemon juice all over the thing, and then showering it with kosher salt like an astronaut in a ticker-tape parade. Both were great. The butter made no difference; in fact, the one without butter had even moister breast meat for some reason.
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The reason was simple. I know how to cook chicken. Or, more accurately, I know how to not overcook chicken. I put a four pound chicken in an oven at 350 for about an hour and 15 minutes, if it’s not brown enough I turn on the broiler for the last five minutes. Done. It sits out while I do something else (like eating the wing tips) and then I cut it up. It’s perfect every time.
Of course, not all of the chicken is perfect. As everybody knows, the dark meat doesn’t cook as fast as the white meat. I used to solve this by throwing it back in the oven, but really, who has time for that? So now I try to prop up the chicken so that at least the heat can move around the chicken’s backside and the skin can cook a little bit. But it’s never really cooked enough. Which is where the my Secret Chicken Weapon comes in. And the Secret Chicken Weapon is a sharp knife, well-aimed.
When a chicken comes out of the oven, it looks nice, but you don’t eat all of it. So why serve all of it to people? After letting it sit, not ten minutes like cookbooks sometimes say but a good twenty minutes at least, you cut off the breast entirely, but not the whole breast; chances are the meat next to the bone is still pink. So you cut a very big part of the breast, and then you slice it into five or six big, steak-like pieces. The bigger the pieces are, the better they will hold their flavor, and the more they will taste like a fine dinner and less like lunchmeat. I cut pieces of dark meat that are done: the tops of the drumsticks, and a half-moon of thigh on each side. If the skin is floppy, as it generally is, I pull it off. The dark meat doesn’t have a real shape to speak of, other than the drumstick’s crisp oval dorsal surface, so I mince it coarsely, dress it with fat and crusties from the bottom of the pan, and serve it on the big platter as a kind of salad.
It’s awesome! And all it takes is a knife.