Roasting a chicken

I have long been an admirer of Jan Roberts-Dominguez, who writes a food column for the Mail Tribune. I find her commentary to be insightful and her recipes both creative and accessible. But a couple of weeks ago – October 28, to be exact - she surprised me (in a bad way) with this article on “The ‘perfect’ roasted chicken.” You can click on the link and read it yourself, but I’ll just summarize here: In search of a moist and flavorful chicken, Jan consults two of her favorite go-to cookbooks, The New Best Recipe and Cookwise, quickly discovering that their definition of simplicity does not match her own. Jan reprints The Best Recipe instructions with the title “'Easy’ Roast Chicken”; quote marks on “easy” suggesting that it’s not.

Well. I love roast chicken, and it’s true that you can just stick it in the oven and wait until it’s done. That’s easy. But as Jan and her favorite cookbook authors have found, the result can be disappointing. So if you want a really good roast chicken you’re just going to have to put in a little more effort. Jan says that the entry on roast chicken in the Best Recipe book was FOUR PAGES (her caps) long, but so is just about every recipe in the book. The beauty of that cookbook is the explanation of what they tried and what worked and what didn’t and why. I love that about it (as I have said in the past, I am a geek that way). The recipe itself is not complex, fitting nicely in a little four inch square on the newspaper page. Maybe I am seriously out of touch, but I cannot see what isn’t easy about this method. You salt and pepper the chicken and brush it with melted butter. You roast it on its side 20 minutes, turn to the other side for 20 minutes, and then turn it breast-side up until done. How hard is that?

The recipe I use is from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but it’s very similar to the Best Recipe one. Julia’s recipe goes on for several pages as well, but that’s only because she explains everything in such detail. Who would have wanted her to leave out the bit about how to tell when the chicken is done: “A sudden rain of splutter in the oven, a swelling of the breast and slight puff of the skin, the drumstick is tender when pressed and can be moved in its socket.” Captures it pretty well, I'd say.

Anyway, Julia instructs you to start roasting the chicken in a hot oven first to brown it, then lower the temperature to finish cooking. Like the Best Recipe folks, she has you turn the chicken a couple of times during cooking. This is essential if you want the breast meat to be juicy, and Julia’s got a couple of extra turns to promote even browning.

Here’s a summary:

Start with a 4 lb chicken. Preheat oven to 425. Rinse chicken, dry it, salt inside, and smear outside with 2 T softened butter. Put chicken breast-up in a V-rack in a roasting pan and put it in the oven. From now on, every time you open the oven to turn the chicken, baste it quickly, starting with another 2 T melted butter mixed with 1 T cooking oil. After 5 minutes turn it on its side. After 5 more minutes turn it on its other side. After 5 more minutes reduce heat to 350. 30 minutes later, put it back on its other side. After 15 more minutes turn it breast side up, and roast for another 15 minutes. Check for doneness as instructed above; it may need up to 15 more minutes.

Okay, maybe that sounds like a lot of fussing. But you're probably in the kitchen anyway, peeling potatoes and trimming green beans and washing lettuce, and all you have to do is brush the chicken a couple of times and turn it over when the timer beeps. This is not hard. I promise.

Julia also has us add vegetables to the pan to flavor the juices for the gravy you’ll surely want to make. I don’t do that, but instead roast the chicken with a stalk of celery, a half a carrot, and a quarter onion in the cavity. I also don’t truss the bird – I don’t think it makes all that much difference and feel vindicated that Best Recipe doesn’t include this step. I use the pan drippings afterwards to make a milk gravy, because that’s what Alekka wants on her mashed potatoes.

The other very important point is to start with a good chicken. I like the organic Smart Chickens that the co-op sells; I have also bought nice ones from Bickle Family Farms. Pretty soon, I’m hoping, we’ll be raising our own. The factory farm chickens from the supermarket surely are cheap when they are on sale and they are fine for making stock, but I think they have an off taste that’s sort of medicinal when roasted plain. (I don’t really want to know what that taste is but I just picked up a copy of Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Eating Animals so I suppose I will soon find out).

Yes, I know this is a duck, not a chicken, but I like the picture. It’s the cover of magazine Andreas picked up for me at the Paris airport. The article (as well as I can tell with my limited French) is about the those crazy Americans and their fascination with French cooking despite its reliance on fat, salt and so on. That’s Meryl Streep as Julia Child in "Julie and Julia," in case by some fluke you missed the movie.