Roasted Chicken

A while back a friend told me about the famed Zuni Cafe method of roasting chicken. I resisted, mostly because it involved flipping the chicken not once but twice. The last thing I want to do in life is try to flip a hot half-raw chicken. It’s actually not that big a deal.

So eventually I tried the recipe and, man, it is good. The method calls for salting the chicken and leaving it in the fridge for one to three days. It sounds gross to keep a raw chicken in your fridge for three days, but it’s actually pretty good. The above link calls for the daintiest 3/4 teaspoon of salt. This is too little. Dump a bunch of salt in your plasticware and roll the chicken around in it. Salty roasted chicken is worth it. In summer I use fresh herbs from outside. In winter there’s no need; in the end, I’m not sure how much flavor is actually imparted by the herbs.

In essence, the recipe calls for cooking the chicken at a blistering 475 degrees breast side up for 30 minutes, then flipping it and cooking it for 15-20 minutes, then flipping it again and cooking it for 5-10 minutes. In general I do 30 minutes then 12 to 15 minutes then 5 minutes. And 475 will make your house smoke. 450 is fine and I’ve lowered it a little more, too. The trick is to make the skillet really hot and pat the chicken really dry. Also, it’s more important to make the underside dry — as opposed to the breast. The drier and hotter it is, the less likely it will stick and rip off precious skin. At the end the skin is crispy and salty and ridiculously addictive. Perch it on a baking rack while it rests to make sure the undercarriage skin stays dry.

Before we had a fancy stove with a self-cleaning feature, it was a challenge; high-heat chicken makes a fuckin’ mess of the oven and cleaning the thing, while not impossible, is annoying. You’ll need a razor blade implement (called a “razor blade scraper”) to scrape off burned grease. It’s still probably worth it.

The byproduct of cooking a chicken in a skillet is of course the fat. At any given time I have several plastic containerof chicken fat, labeled by date. I don’t like to waste stuff, so it’s nice to find new ways to use it. Solution: Madhur Jaffrey’s South Indian-Style Green Beans. It’s just one pound of green beans, boiled for 5 minutes, then cooked in olive/canola oil with whole cumin seeds, whole brown or yellow mustard seeds, sesame seeds and cayenne pepper. And salt.

The flavors are great, but you know what is even better? Cooking shit in the chicken fat leftover in the pan. So, so good. We did the same with potatoes. Also, good.