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WIRED
13-04-2025
- General
- WIRED
If You Like to Get Nerdy in the Kitchen, Try Roasting a Chicken on a Stick
This simple gadget is a fun and inexpensive way to tinker. Photo-Illustration:; PoulTree If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. Learn more. 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.'
The Guardian
02-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
How to cook the perfect roast whole new potatoes – recipe
When I pitched the idea for today's column, my editor's response was underwhelming to say the least. 'Is that even a recipe?' he asked, which is exactly the attitude that inspired me in the first place. Often the simplest dishes feel in the least need of an actual recipe, yet surely I can't be alone in thinking that the leathery, greasy roast new potatoes that turn up so often on tables at this time of year show some room for improvement. I used to be of Jane Grigson's opinion that 'new potatoes should either be steamed or put into boiling water with sprigs of mint' – after all, they're so good, and their season so short, from April to August, why meddle with perfection? But, having recently enjoyed crisp-skinned, buttery- fleshed beauties from a restaurant oven, I'd like to add them to my repertoire, too. While anyone can roast a potato, doing it proper justice clearly requires a little more thought. New potatoes are, as the name suggests, the first of the early potatoes to crop each year – the ones with the thin, papery skins that can be rubbed off with a fingernail. The first and smallest of these are, I think, still better steamed and buttered or oiled; there's not really enough skin on them to crisp, but the slightly larger, more robust ones that follow are admirably suited to this endeavour, which seems only to intensify their slightly nutty flavour. Though the term 'new' refers only to freshly dug potatoes of any early variety, those sold as such in this country tend also to be waxy, with a high moisture and a low starch content. Their dense, smooth flesh is ideal for salads and boiling, because it retains its shape after cooking, but they're no good for fluffy mash or baked potatoes. Jersey royals tend to be the earliest in the shops each year, thanks to the island's milder climate, but you can use anything that's labelled salad potatoes – anya, la ratte, charlotte, epicure – for the recipe below. Don't bother to peel them (if they're really fresh, they should come unwashed, and you can just rinse off the dirt and rub off any sorry-looking bits of skin); not only will the skin crisp up pleasingly, but I think it contains much of the tuber's flavour (in this, and perhaps this only, I dare to disagree with the great Simon Hopkinson, who writes in Week In Week Out, 'there truly is nothing worse than a new potato cooked with its skin intact. Just go away all of you who say: 'but all the goodness and vitamins of a potato lie just beneath its skin!' This does not mean you have to leave it there to get to it'). Do, however, make sure they're all roughly the same size, because that will ensure they cook evenly. (Cutting a few in half is fine, if necessary, but I prefer to leave them whole – they look prettier, and I think the texture is better, especially if you're going to boil them.) Most recipes I try call for the potatoes to be pre-cooked to some degree, much as one would for ordinary roast potatoes. J Kenji López-Alt, Mary Cadogan and Nigel Slater all boil theirs: López-Alt for five minutes (but from cold) until 'the exteriors are tender', Cadogan for 10, which counts as a kind of par-boil, and Slater 'until tender' all the way through. López-Alt writes on Serious Eats: 'Papery crusts occur when the layer of gelatinised starches that crisp up on the exterior of the potato isn't thick enough. As the potato comes out of the oven and sits, steam from its core penetrates the crust, softening it from the inside out. Parboiling the potatoes will help build up this layer of starch.' Nigella Lawson steams hers until tender instead, which she suggests should take 20-30 minutes, though I find the baby new potatoes she specifies are done in half that time. They also taste more satisfyingly potatoey than the boiled versions, something I put down to the fact that they're lost none of their flavour to the water. Delia Smith and David Tanis, meanwhile, both roast their potatoes from raw, though Smith marinates them in oil, vinegar and aromatics for a couple of hours beforehand. On balance, I agree with Slater that 'they need a few minutes in boiling water before they hit the oven if they are not to toughen as they roast' – my testers and I find Smith's spuds chewy rather than crisp (no good can surely come of contradicting two of my culinary heroes in one column, but I'm duty bound to report my findings). Tanis's are much better, for reasons I shall go into later, but for a simple roast spud, pre-cooking seems the safest bet. López-Alt, like Smith, adds vinegar, in his case to the water when boiling, to 'allow the starch to gelatinise while keeping the potatoes relatively firm and intact', on the basis that 'pectin, the glue that holds vegetable cells together, doesn't break down very readily in acidic environments'. While I'm sure he's right, the likelihood of potatoes breaking down after five minutes in boiling water feels vanishingly slim – and, in any case, I'm going to steam mine. (If this is impractical, put them in a pan of cold, salted water and boil until just tender instead.) López-Alt adopts a technique familiar to me from standard roast potatoes, treating the parboiled spuds a bit rough by 'bashing them around a bit until their exteriors are coated in a film of bashed-up potato bits [which] allows you to crisp up not just the cut surfaces, but the skins as well'. Leaving aside the fact that after just five minutes of boiling, I have to shake that pan like a woman possessed to have any effect on its occupants, I find a simpler, and more effective, method is simply to crush each potato lightly, as Cadogan, Lawson and Slater recommend, 'to break the skin and flesh a little in order to allow the oil to penetrate and the potato to crisp', to quote the last in Tender. Because they all react slightly differently to being squashed, this produces a pleasing variety of shapes to crisp up in as many different ways, from crunchy crags of flesh to thin, almost potato crisp-like shards of skin. Plus, tiny squashed potatoes also look rather comical to my mind. Cadogan roasts the potatoes at 200C (180C fan)/390F/gas 6 for 20 minutes, and Slater for twice that time, while Lawson cranks up the oven by fully 20 degrees and sits them in the middle for half an hour. López-Alt and Smith, mavericks both, turn up the oven to 260C, or 'the highest setting' (which, coincidentally, is 260C), and bake them, in Lopez-Alt's case, for 55 minutes, though I have to whip mine out after half an hour, because they're already bordering on the burnt. They have a decent crunchy crust, as promised, but for me it's too thick and dominant in flavour, in marked contrast with those baked at a lower temperature, which have a more delicate, shattering crispness and still taste predominantly of potato flesh, rather than its sweet, browned skin. A more moderate heat allows them time to acquire a rich, golden tan without drying out. Tanis isn't seeking crispness with his 'steam-roasted' new potatoes for the New York Times, which are baked in a greaseproof paper parcel with aromatics, making them deliciously soft and rich in flavour – a slightly more luxe take on the standard steamed spud that would be perfect for a dinner party, perhaps paired with poached fish or asparagus. I've eschewed any extras that might overpower the subtle flavour of the main ingredient, but as well as using different fats for different effects, you might like to bake your potatoes with chopped rosemary (Slater), smoked paprika (Cadogan for BBC Good Food) or garlic, rosemary, sage and thyme (Smith and Tanis). López-Alt adds shallots towards the end of the cooking, then, after they come out of the oven, sloshes it all with oil, garlic, chives, parsley and lemon zest. Meanwhile, Lawson finishes hers with a 'wincing hit' of vinegar, which cuts through the creamy texture of the potatoes and oil beautifully. Personally, however, I think they're delicious just as they are – these are lucky to make it to the table in my house. (The problem with very simple recipes such as this is that there often aren't many variables, so I must acknowledge that my perfect version is very similar to Nigella Lawson's version in At My Table, but with a slightly shorter cooking time. After all, if it ain't broke …) Prep 5 min Cook 45 min Serves 2-4 500g small new potatoes 1-2 tbsp olive oil, or neutral oil or animal fatSalt Try to find potatoes that are all roughly the same size, so you can keep all their skins intact while steaming; if any really are whoppers, though, then cut them in half. Steam until just tender all the way through, or about 15 minutes for baby potatoes. (Alternatively, put the potatoes in a pan just large enough to hold them all, cover with cold water, salt well, bring to a boil, then simmer until just cooked through. Drain and return to the hot pan to steam-dry before roasting.) Meanwhile, heat the oven and a roasting tin, filled with only just enough oil to coat the base (how much will, of course, depend on the size of your tin), to 200C (180C fan)/390F/gas 6. Put the steamed potatoes on a board and lightly crush each one with a fork, spoon or potato masher, but only just so you hear the skins split, and not so hard that they break apart (though, if a few do, such is life). Remove the hot tin from the oven. If you can, set it on a low heat on the hob to keep the fat warm while you roll each potato in turn in the hot oil to coat. Spread out the potatoes as much as possible, then season generously with salt. Roast for 20 minutes, or until richly golden brown underneath (larger potatoes may take longer), then flip and bake for another 10 minutes. Serve immediately. New potatoes: is roasting sacrilege to you, or am I teaching my grandmother to suck eggs here? Do you prefer them dark and crunchy, or lightly golden and gently crisp? And what do you serve them with? (Plant-based suggestions particularly welcome!)
