ROAST CHICKEN
For excellent results, turn this favourite dinner on its head using our man’s elementary, failsafe trick
There is a persistent myth that cookbooks, particularly those from famous restaurants, are full of white lies; that the recipes are never quite the same as in the places they originate. The supposition is that by changing an ingredient or by withholding some small but significant detail, the chef will protect their creation so that no one else will ever make it as well as he or she does. It is nonsense, of course. But with high-profile controversies like The River Café’s Chocolate Nemesis recipe (many complained that the cookbook was wrong; Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray insist that any failing was due to user error) culinary conspiracy theorists will continue to point the finger.
In my experience, the opposite is true. Chefs are generous types and always seem keen to pass on tricks-of-the-trade. I struggled for years, for example, to get my boiled eggs just right. I want my yolk to be very runny, but I hate it when the white is still transparent and wobbly, with the viscosity and appearance of snot. I had never found a foolproof way of achieving
‘When the weather turns cold, this dish always fits the bill’
consistently good results until I came across Simon Hopkinson’s method. He requires that you use a saucepan with a glass lid. You put the eggs into the pan with cold water, and when it starts to boil, you remove the pan from the heat. Keeping the lid on, you wait for three-and-a-half minutes, and then take them out. Perfect softboiled eggs, every time.
Which brings me, in a chicken-and-egg sort of way, to this month’s recipe, the last in my year of absolute classics: roast chicken. When the weather turns cold, we want warming comfort food, and this dish always fits the bill.
It was only recently, however, that I realised I’d been doing it wrong for years. It was the chef Florence Knight who pointed out the error of my ways.
“Always roast a chicken upside down,” she told me. By putting the bird in the oven with the breast at the bottom, legs at the top, all the juices run through the chicken, into the breast, keeping the roast deliciously moist. It was a revelation. You’ll also find you don’t need gravy, just a decent mound of crispy roast potatoes.