Homework

Most of the professional cooks I know agree that you don’t take the measure of any cook by how fancy he can get or how much of a technical wizard she is.  Fanciness, whether of ingredients or assembly or even techniques, is actually one way that a cook can hide things from the eater.  Rather, the proof of a good cook is whether or not sie can, with confidence and style, execute very simple dishes made with very simple ingredients, and do it extremely well.

Roast chicken is exactly the kind of dish I’m talking about.

For a very long time I simply could not figure out how people managed to screw up roast chicken.  By some miracle, I’d never turned out a bad one. I must’ve had a good example set for me when I was a child, because I have managed to completely ruin almost every other kind of meat I’ve ever cooked at least once, but never roast chicken.

But I did notice that other people somehow did manage to screw it up.  I started to pay attention to this, and what I have divined after paying more attention to badly cooked chicken than I think  was probably good for me is this: people try too damn hard.  A chicken is a simple thing and honestly, like a lot of other things I could mention — tomato plants and writers among them — they thrive on benign neglect.  They don’t need much.  Give them a little structure, a little support, provide for their basic needs, and keep your hands to yourself.

People don’t do this enough with roast chicken.  Afraid of drying out the bird, they jam cans of beer into the poor creature’s body cavity, and succeed only in creating a partially steamed baked chicken permeated with a lingering, frat-house-carpet fug and the piquant tang of aluminum can. (There’s nothing wrong with steamed whole chicken.  It’s very tasty.  But it is not a roast chicken. And you do not steam a chicken by sodomizing it with Pabst Blue Ribbon.  This is not that kind of party.)

Or they decide they need to baste the chicken a million times, slowing down the cooking by opening the oven door every ten minutes.

Or that they should cook it at a lower temperature, on the theory that if it isn’t as hot, the bird won’t get dried out.

Or they drown it in fat by shoving a layer of compound butter under the skin, which will produce a seriously fried skin to be sure but really, if that’s what you’re after, why not just make fried chicken?

There are four simple things you need to know about roasting a chicken, or indeed any whole bird. I’m operating on the assumption that you have already procured a bird worth eating, that is, almost certainly not one of the pale steroid-bulked factory farm horrors that taste like a lifejacket no matter what you do.  I’m also operating on the assumption that you know enough to leave the skin on your poultry like God intended, seeing as how it provides the same useful function inside the oven as it does while the bird is alive: as the late great Allan Sherman sang, “if you’ve got it outside, it helps keep your insides in.”

First: wash and dry your bird.  Use cold water, and rub the bird inside and out with a handful of coarse salt.  This will remove any clotted blood or other stuff you don’t want to cook.  Give it a thorough rinsing, and then dry it well with either paper toweling or, if you prefer and you are going to do a load of washing directly after, with (lint-free please!) clean linen or cotton kitchen towels.  While you are drying, inspect the bird for imperfectly plucked feathers.  It happens.  Get your kitchen pair of needlenose pliers out of the kitchen drawer and remove them.

Second, truss your bird.  This is how you keep things moist and avoid overcooking.  If the whole bird is of a more or less uniform shape and density it will all cook at the same rate.  This is where trussing comes in.  If you don’t know how, let Jacques Pepin show you.  It’s simple and the pro chefs do it for the perfectly good reason that it works.

You should also work toward uniform thickness and density if you are roasting a chicken that has been cut into parts (breasts, thighs, drumsticks, wings).  You will make a little chicken jigsaw puzzle in the pan, and be sure to tuck the wing tips underneath other pieces of meat since they’re the smallest and thinnest and most prone to dry out and/or burn.  How it all fits together best will depend on the size of the bird and the size of the pan.

Third, roast poultry in a hot oven, not a medium one. I favor 450 F for cut-up chickens and 500 F for whole trussed birds.  Cooler ovens will not give you the skin or the meat texture you are looking for.  Trust me, everything will get cooked through to the appropriate temperature, which is 170F in the center of the breast or 180 F in the center of the thigh.  (Seriously, get a meat thermometer.  It saves guessing and screwups based on inaccurate guesses, and you should own and use one anyway.)  If you are the meddling type, feel free to roast a bird on one side, then the other, then finish with the breast up — divide the approximate cooking time into thirds, and base it on a 45- minute roasting time for a two to three pound bird.  If you are not the meddling type, which I most assuredly am not, just bung it in the oven, set the timer for 45 minutes, and let ‘er rip.

Fourth, rest your bird before you carve it.  Once it’s done cooking, remove it from the oven and set the pan somewhere quiet for ten minutes.  This will let it actually finish cooking, and helps to make sure the juices don’t all run out of the chicken onto the carving board the instant you cut into it.  Don’t worry, it will still be hot.

That’s it.  It really is that simple.  You don’t need a roasting rack, a specialized vertical roaster, a rotisserie, a marinade injector, a brine (though brines can be nice if you roll that way and have the time and inclination), a basting brush, or much of anything else.  I make most of my roast chickens in a cast iron frying pan, seasoned with nothing more than salt and pepper, and it never fails.  If you want, you can shove a few cloves of garlic and a halved lemon into the cavity, maybe a branch of rosemary or a few sprigs of lovage or whatever you got that has a perfume that smells good when a chicken wears it.  But truly, it requires less of you to roast a chicken well than it does to make a good omelette.  Wash it, dry it, truss it, salt/pepper it, throw it in the oven, roast it, rest it.  You have plenty of time to cut some bread and make some salad and throw together a vinaigrette.  Or, as I did tonight, to cook some asparagus and quarter a couple of lemons for squeezing on the asparagus and, if you like (and I do), on your chicken.

Oh, and don’t forget the caramelized pan juices in the bottom of the pan.  They’re orgasmic.  We bicker over who gets to scrape them up with a spoon.  Seriously.  This is good chicken.