Roast chicken is probably my favorite food, but here’s a confession:
until a few years ago, I’d never made one myself. Every TV chef and
entertaining expert, it seems, tosses off casual mentions of roast
chicken as if it’s so obvious, so simple, so effortless, the little
black dress of dinner-making. But every TV chef and entertaining expert
also knows that making a good roast chicken is anything but obvious and
simple. (No less a figure than Jonathan Waxman, a famously talented
roaster of chicken, calls it “the litmus test for any good chef.”) There
are, from my casual survey of cookbooks and magazines and what feels
like every single page of the Internet, thousands and thousands of
variations on the “perfect roast chicken,” the overwhelming majority of
which cannot, statistically speaking, be perfect. Some techniques call
for buttering or oiling the skin; some submerge the chicken in brine
beforehand, while others send the bird into the oven dry. Some call for
stuffing the bird cavities; others leave them empty. Some use chicken
simply as vehicles for cleverly blended spice rubs; others set out to
perfume the breast with aromatic herbs. I happen to care, above all
else, about achieving a shatteringly crispy skin, which means that I
need to get rid of as much water from my chicken skin as possible. Which
is why my roast chicken recipe, naturally, involves a hair dryer.
Over the past few days, to my surprise, this method has become a subject
of heated conversation. It began on Tuesday, before the latest
nor’easter. In an uncharacteristic moment of foresight, I hauled a
chicken out of the freezer to defrost and cook during the snow day. I
salted it thoroughly, and set it on a plate in the fridge, uncovered, to
let the skin dry out as much as possible. The next morning, in the
shining white light of a daytime blizzard, I took my chicken out of the
fridge and saw that it wasn’t quite as dry as I wanted to be. So I went
and got my hair dryer to finish the job. I took a picture of the
process, and posted it to Twitter, where people were, in roughly even
groups, thrilled or repulsed by the sight of a beauty appliance in the
kitchen. There was, in particular, no shortage of men (why is it always
men?) sneering at my incompetence. “This is what your oven is for,” a
few said, apparently thinking that I was using the dryer not to dry the
chicken but to cook it. They lingered on my choice of hair dryer—the
Dyson
Supersonic,
a futuristic-looking device that is, at four hundred dollars, absurdly
expensive. (It’s also inarguably better than any other blow-dryer I’ve
tried, though whether its uptick in quality is worth the
several-hundred-dollar premium is a private matter between a person and
her credit card.) And they commented on my sparkly pink manicure—if I’d
wanted the tweet to read as an Alton Brown-calibre kitchen hack, instead
of ditzy prop comedy, I should’ve gone for unvarnished nails and a
hairier knuckle.
Little did the skeptics know that, in blow-drying my chicken, I was
standing on the shoulders of giants. I am far from the first person to
bring the device into the kitchen. Blow-dryers are used by pitmasters in
South Carolina, yakitori chefs in Japan, and kebab cooks in
Brooklyn.
The exquisite nerds at “America’s Test Kitchen” recommend them for
softening chocolate and adding a gloss to cake frosting. And, as for
crisping the skin on a bird, no less a figure than the legendary
cookbook author Marcella Hazan calls for a six-to-eight-minute session
with a handheld hair dryer in her recipe for crisp-skinned roast duck,
which first appeared in her 1978 book “More Classics of Italian
Cooking.” (Now out of print on its own, its contents live on in the 1992
omnibus “Essentials of Classic Italian
Cooking.”)
Skin is a matrix of water, fat, and proteins—adding heat makes the water
evaporate, the fat render, and the proteins settle into the rigid
structure we call “crispiness.” By removing water from the equation
ahead of time, you eliminate steam that might de-crisp the crisping
proteins in the oven, for one thing; and, more importantly, the rigidity
of the dehydrated skin helps the skin stay in place while the proteins
take their time firming up. (There is a similar principle at work in
convection ovens and air fryers.) “When the bird roasts in the oven
later,” Hazan writes, “the fat melts and slowly runs off through the
open pores, leaving the flesh succulent, but not greasy, while allowing
the skin to become deliciously crisp.”
There are plenty of other ways to achieve crispy chicken skin. Hazan
notes that her method is an adaptation of a Chinese technique for
dunking and drying Peking duck, by letting it dry out in the fridge. Air
and time do magic: after twenty-four hours exposed to a refrigerator’s
cold air, a chicken’s whole character changes. Its skin becomes taut and
translucent. It loses its flabby springiness and becomes hard to the
touch, almost resinous. (This is the Zuni Café method, maybe the most
famous roast chicken in the world.) If you don’t have the fortitude or
the luxury to wait for natural dehydration to occur, you could prop the
bird up in front of a box fan, or suspend it from a ceiling fan (as my
editor tells me she once did to a duck in her sister’s childhood
bedroom). But a hair dryer is faster, less cumbersome, and perfect for
getting the hard-to-reach moist spots inside the cavity, and in the damp
little chicken armpits where the wings and legs meet the body. The Dyson
is inarguably faster and gentler but—as with many things in the
kitchen—a substitution based on what you have available will get the job
done just as well.
Roast Chicken à la Dyson
1 small whole chicken (3-4 pounds)
Kosher salt
3-4 cups roughly chopped vegetables
2 tablespoons vegetable oil or ghee/clarified butter
Unsalted seasonings and spices, to taste
½ cup wine, beer, chicken stock, or another flavorful liquid
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
Freshly ground black pepper
½ lemon
1. The day before you plan to cook the chicken, pat it dry inside and
out with paper towels. (Some chickens come packaged with a small bag
containing giblets. Discard the giblets, or save them in the freezer
until Thanksgiving gravy-making time rolls around) Season the chicken
generously with kosher salt, inside and out. You should aim for about ½
to 1 teaspoon of salt per pound. Set the chicken on a wire rack set over
a large plate or rimmed baking sheet, and place it in the refrigerator,
uncovered, for at least twenty-four hours and up to forty-eight hours.
The skin will be translucent, dry, and firm to the touch.
2. Two hours before you plan to serve the chicken, remove it from the
refrigerator. Using a handheld hair dryer on the Cool setting, blow air
all over the chicken, making sure to dry any parts of the chicken that
are still damp, particularly the underside of the bird, and inside the
cavity.
3. In a large mixing bowl, use your hands to toss the root vegetables
with the oil or ghee until evenly coated. Using your hands again, rub
the dried chicken with the oil on your hands until completely coated.
Sprinkle your seasonings or spices all over the chicken. (The chicken is
already very salty, so make sure your seasonings add no additional
salt.) Arrange the vegetables in a twelve-inch cast-iron skillet or a
stove-safe three-quart baking dish, making sure to pour in any oil or
ghee that’s pooled in the bottom of the bowl. Place the chicken on top
of the vegetables, breast side up.
4. Place the skillet with the chicken and vegetables on a rack in the
center of a cold oven, then set the oven temperature to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Once the oven comes to temperature, let
the chicken roast for ten minutes. Increase the oven temperature to
375 degrees and let roast for another ten
minutes. Continue increasing the oven temperature by 25 degrees
every ten minutes until you set the oven temperature to 450 degrees. Once the oven temperature is set at 450 degrees, continue roasting the chicken until an instant-read
thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the breast reads 155 degrees—about twenty to twenty-five minutes.
(The chicken will be in the oven for about eighty minutes total.) When
it’s finished, the chicken should be bronzed and crisp-skinned, and the
vegetables should be just on the edge of charred.
5. Using tongs or paper towels in your hands, gently lift the chicken,
allowing any juices to pour out and onto the vegetables, then move the
chicken from the skillet to a cutting board. Let the chicken rest for at
least twenty minutes, or up to an hour.
6. While the chicken is resting, set the skillet, still containing the
vegetables, on a stovetop burner over medium heat. Pour in the wine or
other liquid, and stir with a wooden spoon, scraping up any brown bits
stuck to the bottom of the skillet. When the sauce starts bubbling, add
the butter, and stir until the mixture is smooth and shiny. At this
point, the roasted vegetables may collapse into the sauce entirely. If
you want to keep them whole, gently remove them with a slotted spoon
before adding the butter. Hold the lemon half over the skillet and
squeeze the juice into the sauce. Taste the sauce and adjust the
seasoning with salt and pepper. If the sauce is too salty, add more
liquid or water.
7. Carve the chicken and serve with the sauce. Return the hair dryer to
the bathroom.
Sourse: newyorker.com
