Lazy Chicken

(I was off wine tasting and dancing at a friend's Bachelorette party in San Luis Obispo this past weekend, and so this week I've called in a ringer for my very first guest post(!) to tell you all about how she's "perfected" roasted chicken. I'm still hesitant to call out a "perfect" roast chicken, but my sister Claire has cooked far more chickens than I ever have, so she knows what works for her. Today she's giving us the 3rd installment in The Roast Chicken Project, and Friday, she'll be talking about one of her favorite uses for the leftovers.)

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The laziest chicken you ever did see.

Just look at that thing. SO LAZY.

Roast Chicken #3 - Lazy Chicken

Are you ready for maximum payoff with minimum effort? Did Julia’s chicken scare you off? Did Zuni Café’s seem a little too.... involved? Well pull up a chair, friend, this is the one you've been waiting for. This is the chicken equivalent of “I woke up like this,” the culinary version of “what, this old thing?” I promise you, anyone who eats this will think you slaved away for hours, basting and coddling and ensuring perfection, when, in reality, you put the bird in the oven and forgot about it for 3 hours. 

Just add chicken. Seriously.

In my house, roast chicken is a thing. We have it at least once a month, and as a result, my freezer is full of chicken carcasses and homemade stock. Lest you think I am crazy chicken lady, there are reasons. First, my husband goes crazy for it. We eat a pretty healthy diet, and meat only makes an appearance two or three times a week. But Sunday dinners are different, and with the week stretched out before us, we like to go all out. Braises, burgers, fried food, and at least once a month, roast chicken and mashed potatoes make their appearance. Second, a whole chicken gives you so much bang for your buck. Cook it once, and you will get at least another meal out of it, plus a fresh batch of homemade stock. Need I say more?

Since we have it roughly once a month, I have tried my fair share of recipes, and always come back to this one. Because it is perfect for Sundays. Because it isn't complicated. Because it is L-A-Z-Y. 

I’ve been making this chicken for roughly two years, every since the recipe for “faux tisserie” chicken appeared in the March 2014 bon appetit. The first time, I followed the recipe to the letter, and it was delicious. But the thing is, the secret of this chicken is that it's not really about what you put on it. It's all about the method. You just leave the chicken in the oven for 3 hours and walk away. THAT'S IT. So while the bon appetit version is delicious, I have perfected it. (YES, Allie, I did).

By way of perfection, I have made this chicken even easier, even lazier. The original recipe called for fennel seeds, crushed red pepper, herbs, a lemon, a whole head of garlic….the list goes on. It's just so unnecessary. When I cook a chicken, I want it to be juicy, with crispy brown skin, and preferably I can achieve all of that in time for dinner.  Enter this chicken. I’ve stripped away the fussy elements, and left it as it should be, all about the chicken. A bit of garlic and herbs give it some flavor, and the olive oil ensures a nice brown skin. But if you are truly lazy, know that I have made this with only salt and pepper, and it's just as good. Because, the chicken is the star. It cooks slowly, basting in its own fat, resulting in a tender, flavorful chicken that is ready for anything.

The only caveat? You really do need 3 hours. This is lazy chicken but it is not weeknight chicken. So make it on a Sunday. Pop it in the oven, do some laundry, watch some Netflix, bake a cake, whatever. What you won't be doing is worrying about what's for dinner. 

Just give it a nice stern look, and voila!

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Lazy Chicken

adapted from bon appetit

Ingredients:

2 TBSP olive oil
1 TBSP Kosher salt
2 cloves garlic, chopped
3 TBSP of at least 2 of the following herbs (chives, thyme, parsley, oregano, or marjoram). Mix and match, or go crazy and use all of them!
1 tsp ground pepper
3-4 lb whole chicken 

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Pat chicken dry with paper towels and place in v rack in roasting pan.*
2. Mix together olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic and herbs. Spread mixture all over chicken and inside cavity. Place chicken in pan. No tying, no trussing, don't stuff anything in there. LAZY!
3. Roast chicken for 2.5-3 hours. If you are in a hurry, it will likely be done at 2.5 hours, but the extra half hour allows the skin to continue to brown and crisp. 
4. Let rest for 20 minutes, and carve into pieces, or shred the meat off the bone. This should be ridiculously easy.
5. Serve as desired. I recommend a nice bed of mashed potatoes and a side of green veggies.

*or, use a wire rack placed on top of a rimmed baking sheet or inside a glass baking dish. You can even use a bed of potatoes. You just want the chicken to be somewhat elevated from its drippings, otherwise the bottom will have soggy skin.

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Zuni Cafe's Roast Chicken

Roast Chicken #2 - Zuni Cafe's Roast Chicken & Bread Salad

It's not surprising that this particular roast chicken popped up early in the rotation for my roast chicken experiment. Zuni Cafe's roast chicken is a cult favorite, revered here in SF and beyond, and it wasn't long after I moved here that I began to hear whispers of it and how I just had to try it. After all of the advance hype, I was certainly ready to buy in the first time I went to Zuni a few years ago. My friends and I put in our order, waited the requisite 75 minutes, and were presented with a truly beautiful burnished bird nestled in a scrumptious looking bread salad. I took a bite, and then another, and then, if I had been a cartoon, you would have seen me deflate like a punctured balloon. I'm sorry to say it, but that particular example of their famous chicken was on the dry side. It wasn't awful, but it was unremarkable enough to make me wonder what all these people, magazines, and fervent bloggers had been talking about. I found myself apologetically telling devotees that no, this was not the best chicken I'd ever had, and any new glowing reviews of it I continued to come across just perplexed me.

Still, I knew I had to include Zuni's chicken in the Roast Chicken Project, both because it is so well-regarded and also a local SF favorite. As a home cook with her share of unplanned kitchen fails, I was willing to bet that my friends and I had just experienced an off-night at the cafe, or even just an off-chicken. So, before I took it upon myself to try at home, I went back to Zuni last week for another try. This time, the chicken was perfectly juicy, with not one dry piece on the platter. As a bonus, my table was positioned directly across from the brick oven, where I watched one hard-working guy roast and carve up countless chickens for two hours (I want a cleaver now).

Next, it was time to try and replicate this chicken dish at home. I found a version of the recipe on Epicurious by Judy Rodgers herself, the creator of the dish. There were quite a few steps involved, and some very specific instructions as to the size of the chicken and the heat of the oven, but it seemed doable and I dove in. I found a suitably sized bird, prepped it and set it in the fridge to chill, and two days later, I got to try my home version. 

So what's the verdict?

Let me say first off, if you have a contentious relationship with your oven as I do, this dish will not be as easy as it should. For one thing, the recipe calls for roasting at a temperature ranging from 450 to 475 degrees, and my oven thermometer refused to budge above 425. This gave me a bit of anxiety as to whether my chicken would cook in the time called for, but since my chicken was on the smaller side, I decided it would be ok (and also crossed my fingers that my hardware-store thermometer is just inaccurate at high temps). Maybe my chicken didn't brown as much as it otherwise would have, but the end result was actually perfectly cooked. And as for Judy's specifics on chicken size, I have to agree with her that a smaller chicken really is better. For one, the cooking time is so much faster, and second, smaller chickens are really a lot tastier than their bloated cousins. 

But is Zuni Cafe's chicken really that amazing? Well, I would say that at least on my second visit, I ate some pretty damn good chicken, and my home version was delicious. But I've also had plenty of other good chicken elsewhere. Really, I suspect that the cultish devotion to Zuni's roast chicken is built up not on the poultry but on that bread salad they serve it on. Because their bread salad is astoundingly good. Like, please bring it to me for my last meal good. Despite the many elements that go into it, it is also not at all difficult to make. Should you visit SF for the chicken? I don't know, but I would definitely recommend buying a plane ticket for the bread salad alone.

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Seriously, I am probably the gazillionth person to write about this cult classic roast chicken, and the recipe is looooong, so instead of rewriting it all out , here are some links to a few different iterations. 

Epicurious - Zuni Roast Chicken with Bread Salad

The New York Times - Zuni Cafe Chicken 

Smitten Kitchen - Zuni Cafe's Roasted Chicken + Bread Salad

Julia's Roast Chicken and a Project!

Roast chicken. It's tasty! It’s economical! It’s really easy to make! How can you possibly go wrong?

Apparently, a million different ways. For starters, it isn’t always so easy, especially if you are dealing with a fussy oven, so-so quality chicken, and a lack of confidence. It’s economical if you buy the cheap, factory chicken on sale at the supermarket, but if you go to your higher end grocery store and shell out for the finest free-range, al fresco life-loving chicken you can find, a whole chicken can actually be quite expensive. Then there is the question of how to roast your chicken. There are so many "perfect" roast chicken recipes out there! The New York Times cooking section alone has 329 results for roast chicken, and I knew better than to even try to google the topic.  Just thinking of all the methods I've personally tried, I can come up with high heat roasting, low heat roasting, roasting in milk, roasting in cast iron, roasting whole, or roasting in pieces. Then there's spatchcocking, roasting under a brick, beer can roasting, rotisserie roasting, etc.

And what happens once I finally choose a cooking style? These various methods bring up even more questions about prep. Should I brine? If so, do I wet brine or dry brine? What about trussing? Do I really need to sew up the ankles crossed like a proper lady or can I let my chicken manspread? Should I let the skin dry out overnight or can I roast it straight from the package? And what goes inside? Do I shove a lemon up the butt and call it a day or do I need more in there? And once I’ve roasted it, what can I do with the leftovers? The questions never seem to end.

But! There is hope! I present to you The Roast Chicken Project! This new monthly series will hopefully help me (and you) answer some of these endless questions. To me, the obvious answer to the question of "What is the best way to make chicken?" is that there probably isn't a best way, but there are ways that will work better for me than others, or plain won't work. This year, I want to take a deep dive and explore a few of the different methods that are out there, and find out what a “perfect roast chicken” means in my own kitchen, or if it even exists. Hopefully, I’ll improve my chicken skills along the way. By next March, I want to confidently roast a chicken without fear. I want to know where exactly to check the internal temperature. I want to know how to carve a roast chicken. I want to know for sure when I'm accidentally roasting one upside down (yep, I’ve done that). I’ve got a few different methods and recipes already planned, and I’m even pulling in some reinforcements to help! Please join in along the way! Comment and share your own roast chicken adventures on Instagram and Facebook with #theroastchickenproject and let’s do this thing!

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Roast Chicken #1 – Julia Child's Roast Chicken

Today, I'm starting off the project with a classic version of roast chicken, from the classical French cooking guru herself, Julia Child. I decided to begin with Julia because, despite how exacting her recipes are, they are so well-tested and researched you are guaranteed to end up with exactly what you are trying to make, as long as you follow them to the letter. Her roast chicken would therefore be the most "traditional" version I could find.

I have to say, this is also probably the fussiest roast chicken method I've ever tried, although it seems Julia was well aware. As she writes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking,

"While it does not require years of training to produce a juicy, brown, buttery, crisp-skinned, heavenly bird, it does entail such a greed for perfection that one is under compulsion to hover over the bird, listen to it, above all see that it is continually basted, and that it is done just to the proper turn."

No kidding. I'm in agreement that this method created a pretty damn fantastic chicken, but I felt compelled to stand next to my oven for about 90 minutes, and that's not what I would call "hand's off." The near constant flipping and basting requires a lot more dedication, but Julia's not wrong in that you do end up with a very brown, buttery, and crisp-skinned bird. I'm not sure that it was any  more crispy than other birds I've cooked though, or so much better that I'll continue her method in the future. It's tasty, yes, but maybe not my "perfect" method.

To make Julia's roast chicken:

1 whole chicken (3-4 lbs)
3/4 tsp salt, divided
6 Tbs salted butter, softened, divided
1 small carrot, chopped
1 small onion, sliced
1 Tbs olive oil
1/2 Tbs minced shallot
1 cup chicken broth
more salt and pepper, to taste

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Sprinkle 1/4 tsp of salt inside the cavity of the chicken and then rub 1 tbs of the butter inside the chicken. Truss the chicken and pat the outside dry. Rub all over with another Tbs of the butter.
2. Place the chicken breast side up in a roasting pan (a v-shaped rack is best here) and scatter the carrot and onion around the bottom. Melt 2 Tbs of the butter with the oil in a small sauce pan. Put the chicken in the preheated oven and roast for 5 minutes, then turn the chicken onto one side and baste with the butter and oil mixture. Roast another 5 minutes then flip the chicken onto the opposite side and baste again, then roast another 5 minutes, for 15 total minutes in this initial browning stage. 
3. Reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees and roast another 30 minutes, basting every 10 minutes.
4. After 30 minutes, salt then chicken and then flip onto it's other side. Roast for another 30 minutes, again basting every 10 minutes.
5. 15 minutes before the end of roasting time, salt the chicken again and flip it so that it is breast side up.
6. When done roasting, remove from oven and place on a plate or cutting board to rest for 10-15 minutes.
7. Remove vegetables from the pan and pour out all but 2 Tbs of juices. Add in the minced shallot and cook for about a minute, then add the chicken broth and boil until reduced by half. Remove from heat and stir in 1 or 2 Tbs of the butter.
8. Carve the chicken and pour a little bit of the sauce on top of the chicken and serve the rest on the side.

Notes:

• Make sure you use an insulated roasting pan, and one that can also be used on the stove top. I improvised with a baking dish and a roasting rack, but my veggies got a little dark and I lost all the good bits from the sauce by not making it in the roasting pan.
• My instructions are for a chicken that is closer to 4 lbs than 3, so if you have a smaller chicken, adjust times accordingly. According to Julia, a 3 lb chicken should take 70-80 minutes, and a 4 lb chicken 75-90 minutes.
• Make sure you use salted butter. I was initially concerned that the recipe did not call for enough salt, but after reading through Julia's cookbook, I realized that she calls for salted butter in most cases, and so that is what I used here.