Roasting chicken is supposed to be simple. It is supposed to be easy. It is not
I hate roasting chicken. There, I said it.
Eating roasted chicken, however, I like. I like forking juicy breast and gnawing luscious thigh and taking big bites of just skin. I like exploring the carcass for surprises – the bits of crunchy cartilage, the sticky nubs at the bottom of the drumsticks, the parts with cute names like oyster and pope’s nose. I like the smell of hot chicken fat, which is even better than that of the much-ballyhooed pork.
My problem is with roasting chicken, because it is supposed to be simple. It is supposed to be easy. It is not. If you’ve ever seen a chef, on TV or in person, roast a chicken, you’re familiar with the seeming effortlessness of this endeavor. In goes a bird and out comes a brown-skinned beauty that’s so juicy it seems impossible and so flavorful that you wonder whether it’s really chicken. When your only task is eating, you eagerly give in to the illusion. You might even imagine yourself, dry-browed and untroubled, serving such a chicken to friends, presenting it with oh-this-old-thing aplomb. But an illusion it is. “Roast chicken is a humble-brag of a dish,” says Charlotte Druckman, who has written cookbooks of her own and one with the chef Anita Lo. “People serve it, like ‘Who, me?’ when it’s actually up there with omelets as a litmus test of skill.”
This becomes clear when your job is to help the chef convert magic to instruction – a job I’ve held for the past 10 years. You have to ask questions. And the answers are horrifying. Under my infernal interrogation, the chefs confess. No, we don’t use regular old chickens; we source slow-growing birds from heritage breeds. No, we don’t just pop the brood in the oven; we hang them to dry in the walk-in for days and days before cooking. And that oven is not the same as your oven, unless you have one fueled by wood fire or a Combi, which lets you dial in both temperature and humidity. If your goal is to eat at a chef’s restaurant, this is all great news. If you’re trying to muster chicken-roasting confidence at home, it’s enough to make you order in.
If you ask me – and if you also promise I won’t be fired from writing more cookbooks for chefs– you’re better off looking to another sort of food professional for advice on roasting chicken. I’m thinking of the test-kitchen operatives and freelance recipe developers who devise recipes meant for home cooks and often end up writing cookbooks of their own.
They call for regular ovens and standard-issue birds and roasting techniques that clock in somewhere between weeknight-easy and weekend-dinner-party doable. Yet while they aim for foolproof recipes, they have never met this fool.
Not to boast, but I have ruined many, many chickens. And even after a decade of roasting them, I am still a wreck from the jump. Often I’m so overwhelmed by the conflicting gospel that I just give up and make a sandwich. Should I listen to the wet briners or the dry briners, the spatchcockers or the splayers or the trussers? Should I heed the stuffers or the tuckers, the oil-rubbers, the butter-slatherers, or the aquaphobes, who insist you add nothing but salt? Or should I break with convention altogether and embrace the feta brines, koji marinades, and other hot new hacks churned out by the food-magazine industrial complex?
And that’s before cooking even begins. Should I cook on a rack, a bed of vegetables, or directly in a skillet? Should I roast high and end low, start low and end high, or roast high, low, or somewhere in the middle the whole time? Should I cook breast side up? Flip the chicken while it’s roasting? Roast the bird on its side? Perhaps endless options excite you, but they paralyze me.
Read more: www.theguardian.com