Ben’s Basic Bird
By evenwhenitsraining | 0 comments
I like to joke with my wife that if I ever wrote a cookbook, it would be called ‘Olive Oil, Salt, & Pepper’ because that’s my response to about 90% of the questions that people ask me about cooking. Well, more specifically, “How did you prepare this?”. People love, love, love my chicken. They love it. Everyone asks me how I do it. You already know the answer. My strongest influences in how I make my chicken are Ina Garten and Thomas Keller. If you don’t know who they are, look them up. They will change your kitchen for the better. The key to great cooking is often not in the recipe. It’s in your technique as a cook. Do you understand why things are done? If you don’t, you don’t know when you can cut a corner and when it’ll ruin what you’re cooking. The biggest enemy of a bland bird is moisture! There I said it. Are you shocked? Are you turning the page? I don’t have time to spell it out but water equals steam. Steam inhibits sugars from carmelizing. Carmelization is the keystone of obtaining a crispy, browned skin that hovers over a juicy flavorful piece of chicken. So next to generous salting of the skin, you must, must, must dry the chicken inside and out before you’re going to be successful. And those people who only cook the breast meat to 155 are too fussy for me. In an effort to get you to cook like me, I’m going to write this recipe about how I think about a chicken, not how a recipe normally looks. There are many reasons for this but if you never learn to cook intuitively, you’ll never cook anything great except cakes.
Related tags: chicken, roast chicken
