If You Like to Get Nerdy in the Kitchen, Try Roasting a Chicken on a Stick
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I love thinking about chicken. Specifically, I like thinking about how to cook chicken well. I can trace a line from my Mom's famous sour cream chicken with chives and paprika, to Cook's Illustrated's 'easy roast chicken' in its original The Best Recipe , and on to Simon Hopkinson's Roast Chicken and Other Stories, with hundreds of other stops along the way.
At home, I love roasting a whole chicken, an art form where, if you do it right, you're rewarded with a dark, crispy skin, delicious leg quarters, and tender breast meat. It's a balancing act, though. Breasts need to hit an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit, but legs and thighs are better when cooked to a higher temperature. It's not like you're cooking a perfectly round, fairly-homogenous, inch-thick hamburger, either. Chickens are … you know … chicken shaped, with different thicknesses, densities, and parts that poke out. Photograph:Roast a chicken breast and it will cook pretty quickly and be ready to pull out of the oven a bit under 165°F, which will allow it to coast to a finish without overcooking, something known as 'carryover cooking.' Thighs, on the other hand, are much more forgiving and become fall-off-the-bone tender with a longer cooking time and if they're cooked to a higher internal temperature, which turns cooking the whole thing into a puzzle.
By tweaking variables, like the oven position, cooking time, and cooking temperature, you can set it on the right flight path for all the parts to glide into doneness at the same time.
Way back in 1999, Cook's Illustrated cooked 14 chickens at different temperatures (or temperature combinations) for that 'easy roast chicken' recipe and came up with a pan-roasting method that starts at 375 degrees and finishes at 450. As a budding technique nerd, I was entranced.
Today, it's surprisingly hard to find a serious cookbook that cooks a whole bird in what you might call the traditional method. They now favor spatchcocking, where you cut out the backbone and lay the bird flat with the skin side up, which allows the leg quarters (drumsticks and thighs) to cook to a higher temperature while keeping the breasts from overcooking. Chef-author Hugh Acheson is a proponent of coating the bird with baking powder for deep and even browning.
Taking extra steps like these might sound fussy, but it can also be a lot of fun. Try it one way one day and another the next and see what you like. If you're following a tested recipe, dinner will likely turn out great. Over time, you'll develop favorites.
The PoulTree attaches to a pan so you can 'levitate' a chicken over it. Courtesy of PoulTree
If that tinkering vibe is your jam, I have a new unique new tool for you to play with, a stout metal rod called the PoulTree with a series of bends along its length allow you to attach it to the handle of a Lodge cast-iron skillet. This allows it to hold a chicken several inches over the surface of the pan.
(Side note: While the PoulTree is a solid, well thought-out item, website photos are almost universally, comically bad. They're a tiny operation, and at this point more of a labor of love than a full-grown business. Try to cut 'em some some slack.)
I bought a nice chicken, sprinkled it with salt inside and out, aka a 'dry brine,' and let it air dry overnight in the fridge. These two steps help keep the bird moist on the inside and crispy on the outside.
The PoulTree team suggests cooking on a hot grill, so I started there, or at least as close as I could. I cranked my Weber grill, hung the bird on the rod over the pan, sprayed it with duck fat to get the party started, inserted a surprisingly fiddly ThermoWorks RFX cordless probe in the breast, then set the whole shebang on the grates and shut the lid.
One particularly fun part about this thing is that's pretty much all you need to do until it's done. Monitor the temperature and pull it out when it gets where you want it to go. I could not resist peeking once or twice, when I watched the drippings and Seattle raindrops vaporize on the pan surface.
Per the manufacturer's personal suggestion, I pulled it when the breast hit 148 degrees, put but it on a cutting board and let it coast right to 165 degrees, at which point the drumstick got up to 188 degrees. This was pretty ideal for both parts. I carved it and got out my notebook. The drumstick and breast meat approached perfection, with great texture and crispy skin. The breast even had a bit of that griller's grail know as 'the jiggle.' The skin ranged between crisp (good!) and a little leathery (fine, not great). The thighs, perhaps, due to their position between the drumsticks and the body, were less perfect than the drumsticks, but still quite good.
I liked cooking with it! I wondered how I might change things the next round, and I kind of marveled at the simplicity of the thing and how it cooked with do-it-on-a-weeknight speed. Interestingly, it got me thinking about how heat and and technique affect cooking.
I also realized a safety item to keep in mind. Before it's time to take it off the heat, figure out how you're going to get the chicken from your grill to your kitchen and where you're going to set it down. You can't really remove the bird from the rod when it's over the grill, and you don't want to walk far at all holding a heavy and still screaming-hot skillet with a chicken attached to it either. I thought about what could've happened if it started burning my hand while I was walking down the stairs from my deck to my kitchen with nowhere to set it down. You also don't want to melt your countertop or scorch up your cutting board. I ended up transfering it on a sheet pan on my grill's (metal!) side table, then walked that down to the kitchen and set it on top of my stove.
A few days later, bird number two was not the smashing success that its predecessor was, mostly because I didn't account for the effects of the weather. On this cooler, wetter day, the grill simply didn't get as hot, meaning that pulling it at 148 degrees didn't carry over as much as I wanted it to by the end of the resting period. I carved the chicken and put the less-done parts in the oven to finish. Not a big deal, an easy-to-fix user error, and being a decently cooked chicken slathered with za'atar, it was still great. The $19 PoulTree offers a $60 "roaster" option, where you buy it with a Lodge pan with the idea that that's all you use the pan for, and considering how scuzzy the pans get during cooking, it's a pretty good idea.
A third bird, this one with no overnight brining or air-drying, simply coated in amba (see the cookbook Zahav Home for more on that goodness) and put on the grill was an unqualified weeknight success. Not a brined and marinated wonder, but still very good.
I was in Oaxaca City for the next round, where I bought a chicken from Pollos José (no relation) in the Merced market. For 'not lugging a heavy skillet around in my baggage' purposes, I just brought a rod and a device PoulTree calls a 'Double Coupe' that allows you to use the rod over a sheet pan. I cooked the chicken over potato wedges and while the sheet pan and spuds definitely did not help the chicken skin crisp up, the schmaltz-roasted spuds were well worth the trade-off.
If you cook the chicken over an empty pan—PoulTree's preferred method—in too hot an oven, it can really turn into a smoke show, so you've got some thinking to do. My chef-pal and regular review helper Hamid Salimian got the willies thinking about cooking it in a hot oven, suggesting brining, then air-drying it before cooking it in a (not-too-hot) 350-degree oven with some veggies underneath. He also suggested marinating it with chilies for caramelization and flavor and trying to cook it breast side up.
Chef Chris Young of Modernist Cuisine and Combustion—a better wireless thermometer than the RFX, IMO—fame also weighed in. He seemed to appreciate how the PoulTree lifts the bird away from the cooking surface, a category that along with rotisserie chickens he refers to as 'levitating birds,' that allow the whole thing to get uniformly dark on the outside. Putting veggies in the pan, he posited, creates steam close to the underside of the chicken, and that part of the skin won't get as nice and crisp as the rest of the chicken.
For both chefs, I got the sense that they might be enjoying thinking about this new way to cook a classic, how they might approach it, and what the final outcome would be. (I hope they did, anyway. At the very least, I was having fun.)
This might've been my favorite thing about the PoulTree. It asks you to think about your desired end result and how to achieve it. It encourages tinkering, and, as a bonus, it cooks fast and easy. If you're into chicken and general kitchen nerdery, trying it out is a fun and inexpensive way to tinker. You can make a speedy weeknight chicken with satisfying results, or be rewarded for putting a little extra care into it. If you throw some veggies in the pan, it's worth the sacrifice.
'This will make things a bit steamier in the oven than a bare pan, but at least the smoke alarm won't be going off,' Young says. 'Personally, I think you want something like potatoes, that benefit from the drippings … For me, nothing beats potatoes soaking up the drippings from a levitating bird.'
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