Lacquered Roast Chicken (and an Anniversary!)

Roast Chicken Project #12 - Lacquered Roast Chicken

We made it! The final roast chicken is here!

And I BURNED IT. 

(face palm)

So much for going out with dignity and grace. 

I may have effed up the aesthetics here, but don't let them fool you, this chicken was good. One of the simplest preparations yet left yielded one of the best tasting chickens of the entire project, even with the overly-darkened skin. The breast meat could be described by no other word but succulent, really. I mean it, there was real danger of me consuming the entire thing the moment I tasted it, and the only thing that stopped me was the prospect of having to pay for my gluttony with $12 take out lunches. My wallet prevailed over my stomach, thank goodness, but now you know this particular chicken should be made when you are ready to eat it. It's just too dangerous otherwise.

This chicken has a bit of a Chinese flavor with the soy sauce, and looks reminiscent of the crispy ducks hanging in the storefronts down in Chinatown, which I thought seemed fitting to bring us into the Year of the Rooster. But at it's root, it's a recipe that follows what I've come to believe is the best way to roast a chicken. Gasp! Did I make that statement? Did my 12 months of research really lead me to find the "perfect" method? Maaaybeee. I'll be sharing more about that on Friday but for now, I'll just point out that this chicken recipe follows the tried and true method of open-air chilling a well-salted bird overnight in the refrigerator to dry out the skin, then roasting at high heat for a little less than and hour, then letting it rest, then serving. It's simple, with barely any effort beyond a bit of pre-planning, and the result is guaranteed to yield juicy meat and crispy skin. Gimme.  

Alsoooooo, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TEA AND FOG!

(Should I have put candles on the chicken?)

Two years ago I decided to do this thing and it's been the most amazing creative outlet for me. I get to do the thing I love and write about it (and I try to put up halfway decent photos that don't make me cringe), and sometimes people even read it! HELLO and THANK YOU if that's you! It's somehow led to a new job and some fun adventures in the kitchen, and I'm so excited to see where it goes in Year 3. 

But Year 3 is going to be postponed for a bit. This blogging thing is super fun, but it's also a very time-consuming hobby that, for the sake of those photos, I have to condense into the daylight hours of my weekends, and with increased work travel and my commitment to myself to put out 2 posts per week, it has started to be a bit of a monopolizer of my free time and sometimes feels more like a chore than something I'm doing for fun. I'm starting to get less out of it than I'm putting in, and noticed a not-unrelated uptick in typos and mistakes. So I'm taking a break! Not a long one, probably just 5 or 6 weeks, but I need to recharge my creative batteries and maybe see my friends and go outside and rediscover my yoga mat. I want to work on my photography a bit and read more books and Marie Kondo the hell out of my apartment. I'm excited to spend some time in the kitchen with some of my new cookbooks and without a camera. I think it's gonna be awesome.

So, I'll see you on Friday with a retrospective on The Roast Chicken Project and my final takeaways, but if you have no interest in roast chicken, see ya in March!

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Lacquered Roast Chicken

From 101 Easy Asian Recipes

• One, 3-4 lb whole chicken
• 2 tbs honey
• 2 tbs soy sauce
• t tsp kosher salt

1. Set the chicken on a wire rack set in a rimmed sheet pan (or in a rack in a roasting pan). Whisk together the honey and soy sauce until the honey is dissolved, the brush the chicken with a thin coat of the mixture on both sides. Let sit for 15 minutes at room temperature, then brush the entire chicken with the remaining mixture. Sprinkle both sides with the salt, place the chicken breast side up and refrigerate, uncovered, overnight or at least 12 hours.
2. When ready to roast, heat oven to 400 degrees and set racks on lower levels. Roast the chicken for 50 minutes, tenting with foil if it begins to brown or burn too soon (see photos for what happens if you don't!). 
3. When the area where the breast and thigh meet registers 165 degrees, the chicken is done. Remove from the oven and rest 15 minutes, then carve and serve.

Notes:

• When you rest the chicken overnight, some of the honey and soy sauce mixture will drip off. Don't be tempted to brush this excess back onto the bird before roasting. I did, and I'm pretty sure that's why the skin burned almost immediately. It was basically just a layer of sugar that I torched. Don't do this.

Low and Slow BBQ Roasted Chicken

Roast Chicken Project #11 - Low and Slow Roast Chicken

I can't believe we are at the penultimate recipe in The Roast Chicken Project! Somehow, it's been 11 months since I started this thing, which is crazy to think about but also not really that surprising, considering how quickly 2016 has seemed to pass. And I suppose it's appropriate that just as my ability to muster any energy or excitement for the rest of this year seems to be waning, I've added a roast chicken recipe that requires extremely little effort on your part. 

What I've essentially done here is take Roast Chicken #3 and dial down the effort involved, if that's even possible. In fact, you could call this edition even Lazier Chicken. The bird gets dusted with a mix of salt, pepper, and celery salt, the oven gets cranked to a mere 275 degrees, and you get to sit back for about 3 or 4 hours and binge watch The Americans (well, that's how I cooked it, you can binge whatever you want). Then, when your house smells amazing and you start to feel a bit hungry, you can wander over to the oven, turn the heat up to 350, and baste the bird with your favorite BBQ sauce. You then have half an hour to assemble an easy salad, and then you are sitting down to a dinner of roast chicken with sticky, sweet/tart/spicy skin, moist meat, and almost no effort involved, including carving. This was another result where I could literally pull the legs right off the bird, no knife needed, and this one gave new meaning to "falling off the bone" because even the breast meat came off in my hand. 

Are you sold yet?

Nekkid Chicken!

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Low and Slow BBQ Roast Chicken

• One, 3-4 lb whole chicken
• 2 tsp kosher salt
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1/2 tsp celery salt
• BBQ sauce of your choice, for basting and serving

1. Heat oven to 275 degrees. Mix the seasonings together in a small bowl then sprinkle over both sides of the chicken and in the cavity. 
2. Roast the chicken, breast side up, uncovered, for 3-4 hours (check temperature at 3 hours, you will likely need a little longer for larger birds, but at this point the thigh meat should read between 145 and 150 degrees.)
3. Remove the chicken from the oven and turn the heat up to 350 degrees. Flip the chicken breast side down and baste with enough BBQ sauce to thickly coat the bird. Roast for 15 minutes, then flip chicken breast side up, baste again, and roast another 15 minutes. At this point, thigh meat should read about 160-165 degrees. 
4. Remove the chicken from the oven and let rest about 15 minutes. Carve and serve with extra sauce, if desired.

Notes:

• Pay close attention to the temperature of the chicken at the 3 hour mark. I roasted about a 4 1/2 lb bird, and left it a little too long in the 275 stage (hey, The Americans is a riveting show, ok?). As a result, after two turns at 350 degrees, my bird was beautiful but the breast meat was a little too dry to call this a huge success. It was perfectly delicious with extra BBQ sauce, but yours can be better. If you think the temperature is already too high after 3 hours at 275, you can shorten the roasting time at 350, to either 5 or 10 minutes per side.
• I used the South Caroline Style Mustard BBQ sauce from my pulled pork adventure back in June. The mustardy sauce was excellent with chicken and gave the bird a lovely, turmeric yellow glow. I also used the rest of the original batch of BBQ sauce and didn't die, so that answers any lingering questions about how long it could keep. The current answer is at least 6 months, yeah! 

Grilled Roast Chicken with Ancho Scallion Butter Rub

Roast Chicken Project #10 - Grilled Roast Chicken

Wait, what is happening? How can you have roasted chicken from a grill? Isn’t that an oxymoron or something?

Probably not. I don’t know, grammar police help me out! But you can certainly have roasted chicken that is cooked on a grill, because what is a grill but a huge outdoor oven? That is exactly what it is, with the capability of adding good, dark sear marks and a little smoky somethin’ somethin’ to your food. It’s magic, is what it is, and when I have the chance to stay in a place with a grill, I make sure to take full advantage of it. That’s why I could be found last week in my Dad’s backyard in Tucson, grilling up the contents of the butcher case at the grocery store.

I exaggerate, of course, but I did make sure he knew I wanted to try roasting an entire chicken on the grill, NOT SPATCHCOCKED, but whole and intact, the way every cooking show/personality/food blog/Jenji Kohan acolyte would tell you NOT to do it. I wanted the challenge, and to see if it could be done and still have juicy white and dark meat and crispy skin, and I didn’t prefer to have to cut apart the raw bird first. And anyway, this is exactly how my Dad cooks his Thanksgiving turkey every year, so this would be a fun, father-daughter experiment on a smaller scale, and a good test run of the grill before the turkey.

Of course, I didn’t go in without researching first, and in the few recipes I found for grilling whole, non-flattened birds, I found good advice about oven temperature and heat source placement, and so I took that info and got to work.  I took a deep breath, plopped a chili and scallion butter-rubbed bird right into the middle of the grill, closed the lid, then headed inside to distract myself for 45 minutes while my chicken hopefully turned bronze and crispy, instead of igniting and flaming up into a charred husk with a raw inside. 

And there was no fire! At the halfway point, I opened the grill top to discover a halfway roasted chicken not unlike the previous 7 or 8 I’ve roasted this year. I flipped it over, covered it again, and danced back into the house to wait out the remaining cooking time. Slightly more than a half hour later, by the time the smoky fragrance of grilled, crispy meat began to waft inside, I knew this was going to be a good bird. And the grill lid lifted again to reveal one of the most beautiful roast chickens I’ve ever seen, burnished to the color of a 90-year old Palm Springs native after decades in the sun, with a slight, charred tinge to the edges I couldn’t wait to tear off with my bare hands. I distracted myself from drooling during the rest period by clipping roses from the garden to fancy my chicken up for photos, then dismantled that baby and tore in.

It was goooood, ok? It was perfectly cooked, with the legs and breast all finished and juicy, all covered in a crackling, buttery skin holding a slight heat from the chiles. I mean. I’m converted, and I would definitely do it again! Except, oh wait, I don’t have a grill. But if you do, you should try it! The lack of cleanup is a huge bonus too. Also a bonus? My dad learned a few tips from this experiment and a couple days later produced THE BEST Thanksgiving turkey any of us at dinner had ever had. Not too shabby. 

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Grilled Roast Chicken with Ancho Scallion Rub

Rub adapted from Food & Wine, cooking method from Epicurious

•  2 dried ancho chiles, stemmed and seeded
• boiling water
• 4 tbs unsalted butter
• 1 clove garlic
• 4-5 scallions, chopped
• salt and pepper, to taste
• 1 whole, 3-4 lb chicken

1. Heat the grill: if using a gas grill, light 1 burner if a 2-burner grill, or if a 3-burner grill, light only the 2 outside burners, leaving the middle burner off. The grill should be between 350-400 degrees. If using a charcoal grill, only heat one side of the grill.
2. Make the rub: In a skillet, toast the dried chiles for a minute or two, then transfer to a small bowl and cover with boiling water. Let soak for 15 minutes, then drain and let cool.
3. Add cooled chiles to the bowl of a food processor with the butter, garlic, and sallions and pulse to combine into a paste. 
4. Season the chicken generously with salt and pepper, sprinkling some inside the cavity. Rub the chicken all over with the ancho scallion mixture. Be sure to rub as much of the mixture as you can under the skin as well as in the cavity and all over the surface of the skin.
5. Place the chicken on the unlit part of the grill, breast side down. Grill for 45 minutes, covered, then flip the chicken breast side up. Grill, covered, for another 35 minutes or until an instant read thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the thigh reads 165 degrees.
6. Remove chicken from grill and let rest for 10-15 minutes, then carve and serve.