Eat Drink Play
Pros give us hints on how to amp up the flavor of a classic
Tableful of tips for roast chicken.
Back away from the supermarket rotisserie. Sure, those fragrant, juicy roasted chickens are the very definition of dinnertime ease. Pop off the plastic dome, and dinner’s right there. But DIY roast chicken is too easy to even need shortcuts. Do it yourself, and you control everything, from the salt and spices to the servings. Your flavor profile can go Peruvian, Southwestern or Italian, sodium-free or thoroughly brined — and did we mention you don’t even have to roast the whole bird?
In its most basic form, a roast chicken simply gets a dusting of salt and pepper, before sitting in a hot oven for 75 to 90 minutes, filling your kitchen with divine aromas. Stuff half a lemon, some fresh thyme and a few smashed garlic cloves inside the chicken first, then tuck sliced onions around the bird before roasting, and you’ll have the entire neighborhood at your door, drawn by the fragrance like a Looney Tunes cartoon.
But there are ways to gild the poultry lily and take that fowl to new heights. So we asked three pros, including brine-devotee and “Top Chef Masters” alum Naomi Pomeroy and brine-opposed Kenji Alt-Lopez, the San Mateo author of the James Beard award-winning “The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science” (W.W. Norton, $50), for tips.
Actually, Alt-Lopez is opposed to a number of things in the poultry world, starting with misleading labels like “hormone-free chicken.” By law, all chicken sold in the U.S. is hormonefree, so that “marketing gimmick,” he says, is about as useful as supermarkets touting chicken as “deadly cyanide free.” He’s also not particularly keen on basting — you risk overcooking the chicken breasts, he says, and basting does nothing to increase juiciness.
He’s also anti-trussing. Tying the chicken’s legs together may look tidy, but “it ends up protecting the thighs, which is actually the part you want to be most exposed when cooking. The thighs need to cook more. I recommend the opposite — spatchcocking — cutting out the backbone, laying the bird flat and spreading out its legs. Salt, pepper, a really high temperature oven.”
Salt and pepper are really all you need, he says, although he concedes that a fresh herb and lemon zest rub and butter do sensational things to a bird, and his Peruvian roast chicken, served with a creamy green sauce, is one of his favorite dishes. And, as we mentioned, he dislikes wet brines.
“The problem is that with a traditional wet brine, the chicken absorbs some of the water. The chicken ends up tasting watery,” Alt-Lopez says. “Instead I do a dry brine. Basically you’re heavily salting the chicken — or turkey — and letting it rest overnight. The salt will dissolve the juices on the surface and break down muscles as it works into the meat, but the juices that were in the chicken stay in the chicken.”
Pomeroy, on the other hand, says limited brining — 60 to 90 minutes, tops — can transform pan-roasted chicken breasts. “This dish,” the Portland chef says in her new “Taste & Technique: Recipes to Elevate Your Home Cooking” (Ten Speed Press, $40), “is the single most convincing argument for brining I can put forth. The difference between a chicken breast that’s been brined and panseared and one that’s just been pan-seared is like night and day. The brine imparts moisture and flavor into what can be an uninspiring piece of meat.”
Her favorite roasted chicken dish starts by searing brined chicken breasts on the stove, then finishing them in the oven. Use boneless chicken breasts with the skin on, both for flavor and protection against dry meat. If your supermarket doesn’t offer that option, simply buy it on the bone and render it boneless yourself.
“It is easy to do,” she says. “Lay the breast, skin side up, on a cutting board and look for the layer of bone under the meat. Insert a small, sharp knife between the bone and the meat and slice the meat off the bone.”
Food52’s Amanda Hesser favors a combination of those techniques. She drybrines chicken thighs: Salts and peppers them in the morning and places them in the fridge, uncovered, to chill — in every sense of the word — until dinner time. Then she pan-sears them to get that crispy, golden exterior and finishes them in the oven.
“This is more technique than recipe,” she says in her new book, written with co-Food52 founder Merrill Stubbs, “Food 52 A New Way To Dinner” (Ten Speed Press, $35). “Pan-roasting chicken produces brown, crisp skin and juicy insides in a single pot in very little time.”
Best of all, you can scale the recipe up with nearly no effort. Roast 12 chicken thighs — or more — and you’ll have enough for dinner tonight and lunches all week.