My mom always had a knack for cooking. I've never seen her open a recipe book, but everything she puts on a plate is delicious. When I first moved to California for grad school, my mom came out with me to help me set up my apartment. That first night, we drove to the Albertsons and picked out a nice, plump chicken for roasting. I'm not sure what she did to the bird-- from my vantage point it just looked like she waved her hands over it a few times-- but all I remember is that by the time she pulled it out, it was crispy on the outside, and amazingly juicy on the inside.
But unlike my mother, who's cool and poised when she cooks, every single time I've tried to roast a chicken, a zillion questions run through my head. What do I put on it? What kind of pan do I put it in? What direction should the chicken be facing? What side should be up? Do I have to put foil on it? How high should I set the oven? How long should I roast it? What the hell am I supposed to do with this meat thermometer????
After wringing my hands for a while, I inevitably pull out the ol' Google and type in, like a fool, "ROAST CHICKEN OVEN".
Am I the only one who can't reliably roast a chicken without checking a recipe every time? You'd think this would be an incredibly easy task. My mother could perfectly roast a chicken with her eyes closed, while juggling flaming hula hoops. Or maybe that's a skill set that you magically inherit once you push a baby from your loins.
The Joy of Cooking recommends three different ways to roast a chicken. The easiest one only involves three ingredients: salt, pepper, and butter. It sounds easy enough, but it turns out, roasting a chicken-- and making it taste good-- is hard! Even picking a chicken is hard! When I thumbed through the poultry section of The Joy of Cooking, all these crazy words were popping out at me: broiler!, capon!, fryer! Wait, what? Was I still in the chicken section?
McGee to the rescue.
Apparently a "broiler" (also called a fryer!) describes exactly what you ought to do with that particular bird. Broilers are for broiling. They max out at about 3.5 lbs, so they cook fast using high heat methods. But roasters... they're for roasting. These chickens are allowed to live twice as long as their broiler brethren, and thus weigh twice as much. And the best part is that they're insanely cheap. I went to the store and picked out a fat, heavy 4.5 lb chicken and it was only $5. You can't get anything in Orange County for $5! My wallet actually smiled. But, my challenge was just starting.
The Joy of Cooking has an incredibly lengthy section detailing just how hard it is to cook a whole bird. It's full of warnings about how the breast and the legs cook differently, and there is seriously an entire chapter devoted to different ways of combating this. A few of them involved flipping the chicken in different ways, one of them had some kind of soaking method, one of them involved a syringe. McGee had a few dozen suggestions of his own, most of which looked daunting, time-consuming, and definitely... not something I felt ready for.
Yikes. Never again will I underestimate the power of a roasted chicken. All my life, I thought you could just pour some oil on it and throw the damned thing in the oven.
Luckily, The Joy of Cooking provided me with a much easier alternative-- a roasting rack. I had one sitting around that an old roommate had left behind, and even though I'm 99% sure it's for cookies, I thought, what the hell! Let's put a chicken on it! And you know what? It worked. I put the roasting rack in a shallow roasting pan, and it propped up the chicken (breast up) enough so that it wasn't just sitting in its own released fats, and it let the hot air reach under the chicken so that it cooked evenly.
Preparing the chicken
What the cookbooks don't tell you is that if you rub melted butter on a cold, refrigerated chicken, that butter turns solid really fast. My butter/salt/pepper mix started glooping the second I slapped a handful on the chicken, and there it sat. I assume this would be mitigated if I had actually let the chicken warm up a bit, but the damage was already done. I figured the butter would melt once it hit the oven anyway (AND I WAS TOTALLY RIGHT! YEAH!!!!!).
Roasting
Here's a quick factoid about me: I work in a protein crystallography lab. On average, we probably grow around 20 liters of E. coli a week. Concentrated, that's probably enough to frost a few cakes. So I'm very, very careful when it comes to making sure meat is heated to a safe temperature. I already work with bacteria... the last thing I want to do is eat a giant mouthful of it. So that's why you need to hit a certain temperature. The Joy of Cooking has this rule of thumb: cook until a meat thermometer jabbed into the thigh reads 165-170F. By the time you take it out, it'll keep cooking until it slowly reaches 180F.
Now, why 165F? That is a damned good question, and one that I never really thought about until now. It seems as though it's 2-fold.
1. BACTERIA. E. coli remains alive and kicking until 155F. The last thing I want to do after eating a fine meal is spend the entire night screaming in pain, so this makes a lot of sense. In fact, that's a good number to keep in mind. 155F = No E. coli. 10 degrees here and there doesn't sound like a lot, but then I learned this: Salmonella positively thrives at temperatures up to 140F! So, since we're working with chicken here...
2. Juicy, juicy legs. After flipping through the meat section in McGee, I stumbled up on this neat fact. Because the red meat chicken legs is packed with connective tissues, it doesn't really break down until it hits 165F, otherwise resulting in meat that's more chewy than juicy. I was a little impatient and kept opening the oven to check my chicken thighs, which I'm sure slowed down the process a little, but eventually I hit the number I wanted. I was rewarded with amazing drumsticks that oozed with chicken juices.
Another thing about the roasting: the recipe asks for you to preheat the oven to 450F. Then once the chicken is actually inside the oven, you're supposed to drop the heat to 350F. McGee tells me this two-stage roasting process does two things-- first, that blast of 450 browns the skin nicely and seals the meat from the outside (trapping all the goodness on the inside), but lowering it to 350 lets the chicken cook more gently, so it doesn't dry out as quickly. What this gave me was a chicken with amazingly crisp skin, but meat that gushed with clear, hot, amazing juices when I cut into it.
So at the end of the day, I was really proud of myself. Roast chicken sounds trivial, but I've never gotten it perfect before. The chicken that I pulled out of the oven was amazing. It was flavorful and moist, and the friend I had over for dinner refused to believe that I only used salt, pepper, and butter. But the secret might actually be in the oven.
Oh, one quick confession? I still can't carve a chicken.
