Roast chicken at a high heat

I have always subscribed to the view that to cook a perfect roast chicken you need to cook it at as low a temperature as possible while also finding a way to brown it. Starting it off at a high heat and then lowering the dial is the standard method. I like the leg meat to be well done and tender, but of course I don’t want the breast meat to dry and toughen.

I bought a small Cotswolds chicken (1.4kg). I put it in the top of the oven at gas mark 6, 200C. Forty-five minutes later, I transferred it to the bottom shelf, replacing it with a roasting pan of potatoes. I took the chicken out of the oven 40 minutes later.

It was perfect. The legs were very tender, and the breast – I had massaged butter in between the skin and the meat – was still moist.

Sometimes, or rather quite often now I think about it, food does not behave how science says it should. I do recommend Cotswold chickens.

Roast chicken, with its stock
Heston's roast chicken

Chicken with paprika

This is a very simple dish, which can go wrong if the ingredients exude too much liquid. The key is putting on the lid of the pan and taking it off again as required. Serves 2.

Oil for frying
1 red pepper, seeded and cut into fork-sized chunks
100g chestnut mushrooms, washed and sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1tbsp paprika
1tsp caraway seeds
1/3tsp salt
2 chicken supremes, cut into fork-sized chunks
1 bunch spring onions, sliced
150ml sour cream or crème fraiche

Warm a couple of tbsps of oil in a heavy pan, throw in the pepper and mushrooms, cover, and cook over a gentle heat, stirring regularly. Both vegetables should exude some liquid.

After 10 to 15 minutes, when the peppers are starting to soften, add all the rest of the ingredients, and cook over a moderate heat with the pan uncovered, again stirring regularly. The chicken and onions may disgorge a good deal of water, most of which you want to evaporate. The chicken should cook through in 15 minutes or so.

Pour in the cream, and let it bubble and thicken. (I find that factory-produced crème fraiche tends to split. In France, I buy crème fraiche fermière, which never splits.)

Fried chicken with paprika and cayenne

If you use egg as the adhesive when frying chicken, the coating may become claggy. A good many recipes recommend buttermilk; but, having no further use for buttermilk, I would have to throw a good deal of it away. So I tried an egg and milk mixture, which worked well. Gluten-free flour works well, too – it’s less stodgy than wheat flour.

I like chicken to be well cooked, so I poach the drumsticks first. You can keep the stock for another recipe.

Season the flour liberally. The amount of flour that will end up as coating is quite small.

Serves 2.

6 chicken drumsticks
1 egg, beaten
100ml milk
Gluten-free flour
1tbsp paprika
1/2tsp cayenne pepper
Salt, pepper
Sunflower oil

Cover the drumsticks with water in a saucepan, bring to a simmer, and cook, covered, for 45-60 minutes. Take out the drumsticks and keep the stock for another recipe.

In a wide bowl, beat the egg with the milk.

Cover a plate with flour, and season it with the peppers and salt.

Dip the drumsticks in the egg mixture, and roll them in the flour.

Put sunflower oil into a heavy, 28cm frying pan to a depth of about half a cm. Place the pan over a medium heat, until a small piece of bread sizzles in the oil. Fry the drumsticks until crispy on each side – about 10 to 15 minutes.

Heston's roast chicken - support for my scepticism

"Brining the bird before cooking, as Heston Blumenthal suggests, just masks the flavour of the meat – definitely not worth the hassle," Felicity Cloake writes, in her recipe for "perfect chicken pie".

This is my view, too. Others disagree, as responses to one of the most visited posts on this blog, Heston's roast chicken, indicate.

I have had greater success, however, with brined pork chops.

Brining chicken revisited

Roast chicken and Maillard reactions

The cooks’ consensus, with which I have always agreed, is that you start cooking a chicken or joint of meat at a high temperature, to brown it, before lowering the dial. But my previous observation about browning reactions (known as Maillard reactions) – that they work more efficiently once the cooking process is well established - made me realise that this initial blast may be unnecessary.

Roasting a chicken the other day, I simply cooked it at gas mark 4/180C throughout (2 hours, for a 2kg bird – butter massaged between the skin and breast, rubbed all over, placed inside the cavity; lemon squeezed over and placed inside the cavity, into which I also placed two bashed garlic cloves). It emerged from the oven perfectly bronzed.

Why do meat and skin brown more efficiently later in the cooking process? Their loss of water, which would inhibit browning, may be one explanation. But it does not account for why, when one fries meat in batches in a frying pan, the later batches brown more efficiently. The reason for their doing so may explain also why the first pancake is usually a flabby disappointment.

Chicken with lemon, garlic, red onion, and turmeric

The chicken with lemon, garlic, and rosemary dish I made in September may be even nicer with turmeric substituted for the rosemary, and with two red onions, sliced. The turmeric (1 to 2tsps) tempers the sharpness of the lemon.

Add it after the dish has been cooking, covered, for 25 minutes or so, by which time the ingredients should have created a sauce. Add it at the beginning, and the powder may catch on the base of the pan. I was liberal with the black pepper.

Chicken with vindaloo spices

Vindaloo implies garlic and vinegar rather than the hottest dish in the restaurant. But it may be hot too.

This is another recipe from Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Easy, a lovely, tempting book. Even here, though, you have to accept that the recipes will not always work precisely as described. I’ve included my comments below. Serves 4.

4tbsp olive or rapeseed oil (I used sunflower)
1/2tsp brown mustard seeds
1/4tsp fenugreek seeds
1tsp black peppercorns
15-20 fresh curry leaves or 10 fresh basil leaves, torn (I used dried curry leaves, which I’m not convinced taste of anything at all)
8 chicken thighs
6 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
250ml cider vinegar or white wine vinegar
1 1/4tsp salt
1 1/2tsp ground cumin
1tbsp ground coriander (I used cumin and coriander seeds, which I toasted and then ground in a mortar)
Cayenne pepper to taste
1tbsp sweet red paprika

Put the oil in a large saute pan or wide frying pan – wide enough to hold the chicken in a single layer (it will need to be at least 28cms). Set over a medium heat. When hot, put in the mustard seeds. As soon as they pop, put in the fenugreek seeds and peppercorns. A few seconds later, put in the curry leaves, chicken, and all the remaining ingredients. Stir and bring to the boil (though you may find that the vinegar froths up immediately, before settling down).

Cover, lower the heat and simmer gently for 20 minutes. (I put my dish in the oven for an hour – I like my chicken tender.)

Remove the cover, turn the heat to high and cook, stirring and turning, until all the liquid evaporates and the chicken browns on all sides.

The previous paragraph suggests that you're frying the chicken at the end. I found, however, that the evaporation process left me with a sticky sauce, which would have burned if I’d continued to cook it too vigorously. No matter: the dish was delicious.

Chicken tikka, simplified

Forced compromises can sometimes lead to happy discoveries. For example, you don’t always need to include a huge medley of spices in a dish. Because of aversions among some members of my family to cumin, coriander, cardamom, and other traditional ingredients of Indian dishes, I included only three spices in this baked chicken dish, which we took on a picnic. We all loved it.

2 chicken supremes, cut into fork-sized pieces
2 cloves garlic, crushed into a pulp with a little salt
1tsp turmeric
1/2tsp ground ginger (I would have used grated fresh ginger if there had been some in the house
Cayenne pepper to taste
Salt
About 2tbsp Greek yoghurt
Lime juice

Toss the ingredients in a baking dish. There should be just enough yoghurt to coat the chicken. If you have time, leave the chicken to marinate in the fridge, covered, for a few hours.

Put the dish in a hot, gas mark 8 (230C) oven for about 20 minutes, until the chicken has a reddish brown glaze and is cooked through.

Chicken with lemon, garlic, and rosemary

A Nigella Lawson recipe for baked chicken and lemon asks you to cover your pan at first, before uncovering it to allow the meat to brown. This is not a great idea if you use a jointed chicken: the breast pieces will overcook and toughen. But it works well with thighs and drumsticks. They become very tender, as does, in this version, the garlic. When I made it last week, I used drumsticks only.

I have a heavy, shallow, 28-inch casserole. A roasting tin, with foil as covering, would work too.

12 chicken drumsticks
As much garlic as you like, separated into cloves, unpeeled
1 lemon, quartered
2 sprigs rosemary
2tbsp olive oil
Salt, pepper

Put the ingredients in a heavy, wide casserole or roasting tin, toss them thoroughly, and bake, covered, in a gas mark 6/200C oven for 45 minutes. About half way through this time, give the ingredients another stir. If they are bubbling too fiercely, turn down the heat.

Remove the lid or foil, reset the dial to 6 if necessary, and cook for a further 30 minutes, to brown the meat and reduce the sauce.

Very simple, and delicious.

Chicken sofrito

This dish comes from Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, who suggest that you might use a butterflied chicken “if you have a wide enough pan”. That pan would be pretty wide – a 1.5kg butterflied chicken would not fit in my 28cm, shallow, cast iron dish. It might, if I removed the backbone and cooked the bird in two pieces; but the problem, as I have written here before, is that the breast is likely to become tough before the legs are tender. I used instead 6 chicken thighs, which are what my pan will accommodate. Otherwise, I stuck to Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s quantities. The amount of paprika and turmeric may seem modest, but is enough to give the dish a subtle flavour, as well as an appealing, golden red colour.

1tbsp sunflower oil
6 chicken thighs
1stp sweet paprika
1/4tsp turmeric
1/4tsp sugar
2 1/2tsp lemon juice
1 large onion, peeled and quartered (I used 3 shallots, each cut in half)
Sunflower oil, for frying
750g Charlotte potatoes, peeled and cut into 2cm dice (I used Jerseys, scraped)
25 garlic cloves, unpeeled
Salt and black pepper

Put the oil into your dish over a medium heat, and fry the chicken, skin side down, until golden brown. Sprinkle over the paprika, turmeric, sugar, 1/3tsp of salt, and 1 1/2tbsp of lemon juice.

Turn the chicken pieces over, set the heat to low, cover, and cook for 1 hour. Check that there is just enough liquid in the pan to steam the chicken and prevent it from catching. (I find that the chicken thighs give off a generous quantity of their own liquid.)

Pour enough sunflower oil into a saucepan to come 3cm up the sides. Set the heat to medium high, and when the oil causes a small piece of bread to sizzle, add as many potatoes and garlic cloves as the oil will cover. Cook until the potatoes start to brown – the book says that this takes about 6 minutes, but in my experience it may be some time longer. Lift the potatoes and garlic from the oil with a slotted spoon, put them on paper towels, and sprinkle with salt. Then fry another batch.

After the hour is up, transfer the chicken pieces to a plate. Stir the fried potatoes into the pan, and put back the chicken on top. Cover again, and cook for 30 minutes.

Drizzle with the remaining lemon juice before serving.

The potatoes, with flavours both from the frying and from the spiced chicken juices, are gorgeous.

Spatchcocked chicken

Spatchcocked chicken

I like the idea of grilling a whole chicken, spatchcocked and laid flat on the rack. It suggests a rustic approach to outdoors cooking. But it’s a difficult process to get right. The heat from a grill may be fierce, and burn the exterior of the bird or toughen some of the meat before cooking it through.

The weather still being inimical to barbecues, I cooked my spatcocked chicken at the bottom of my grill drawer, with the heat set to its lowest. I didn’t help my cause by using soy sauce in the marinade, along with the juice of a lemon, a couple of glugs of olive oil, and a couple of cloves of crushed garlic: the sugar in the sauce caramelises, and burns. You have to turn the chicken regularly.

It took about 45 minutes. This is about half the time that would have been necessary to roast it; nevertheless, the breast was tougher, because of the intense direct heat, than the breast of a roasted chicken would have been. In future, I’d prefer to chop up the chicken, cooking breast and legs for the different times that suit them.

Roast chicken, with its stock

Prolific cookery writers produce innumerable recipes for roast chicken, so perhaps I may allow myself to publish what is not the first example of its kind to appear here. (My entry on Heston’s roast chicken is the most viewed item on this blog.) I tend to stick to a technique for a while, and then to move on to another one. This is my current favourite. The timing is for a chicken of 1.5kg.

Gently work loose the skin above the breast bone, insert a knob of butter, and try to push it around so that it smears the breast meat. Rub the outside of the chicken with a little oil (olive or vegetable). Shove into the cavity of the bird whatever flavouring agents you like – lemon, onion, garlic cloves, herbs. Season with salt and pepper.

Put the chicken into an oven dish, along with any giblets you have (apart from the liver), and a halved onion. Pour in (but not over the chicken) 200ml water. If you do not have giblets, cut off the wing-tips and use those.

Roast at gas mark 6/200C for about 30 minutes, by which time the skin should have started to brown. Turn the giblets and onion pieces. Continue to roast at gas mark 2/150C for a further hour – but check that the chicken is continuing to cook at a steady pace, adjusting the heat if necessary.

Remove the chicken from the dish, and pour the stock into a small saucepan, adding the giblets and onions too. Having removed the lemon/onion/herbs first, you can hold the chicken by the wings with paper towels in order to pour the juices from the cavity into the saucepan as well.

I have a grill drawer above my oven, and I keep the roasted chicken in there to keep warm. It will hold for at least half an hour.

If you have just the right amount of stock (which is your sauce), simmer it further in a covered pan. If you want to reduce it, simmer it in an uncovered pan. Or you could top it up with more water before simmering it.

Check the seasoning. Strain the stock/sauce into a heated jug, and serve with the chicken.

Brining chicken revisited

One of the most visited posts on this blog is Heston’s Roast Chicken (link below). In it, I express scepticism about the process of brining a chicken before roasting it. But some cooks continue to swear by brining, both for chicken and - as popularised by Nigella Lawson - turkey.

When I came across “Perfect roast chicken” in America’s Test Kitchen (a book I introduced in the previous post, on Skillet lasagne), I decided to give the method another go - particularly because this brining lasts for just one hour. It produces “maximum juiciness and well-seasoned meat”, the Test Kitchen authors assert.

The brine recipe (translated from US measurements) is: 4 litres of water; 150g salt; 100g caster sugar. Some writers instruct you to boil the mixture, allowing it to cool before dunking the meat; but you should find that table salt will dissolve readily in cold water.

Submerge the chicken in the brine in a non-reactive container. After an hour, remove the chicken, pat it dry with paper towels, rub the chicken with a little oil, and insert some butter between the skin and the breast.

The book advises you to cook the chicken at 200C/gas mark 6, turning it several times. I prefer to start at this temperature, and to dial it down to 170C/gas mark 3, or lower (depending on progress), after 30 minutes. I also ignored the advice about turning the chicken, because I usually find that this causes the skin to tear.

I remain a sceptic. The breast meat of a brined chicken may be moister, but it seems to me to have a consistency that evokes blotting paper. If the only alternative is dry and tough, I’d still prefer it.

Pork chops, though, are another matter. I’ll write about them next week.

Heston's roast chicken

Spiced chicken with yoghurt in a parcel

Another recipe adapted from Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Easy. I doubled the quantities of cumin and coriander, and increased the cooking time.

Serves 4

2tsp cumin seeds
2tsp coriander seeds
2tsp paprika
Cayenne pepper to taste
2 cloves garlic, placed in a mortar with salt and crushed
1 1/2tsp fresh ginger, grated
3tbsp Greek-style yoghurt
2tsp lemon juice or white wine vinegar
Salt to taste
Ground black pepper to taste
8 chicken pieces (thighs and/or drumsticks), skinned

Toast the cumin and coriander over a gentle heat in a small saucepan. Grind them in a mortar. Mix them with all the other ingredients (apart from the chicken) into a paste.

Choose an oven dish large enough to hold the chicken pieces in a single layer. Place in it, overlapping the sides equally, a piece of foil of at least double the size; lay the chicken pieces in it, and smear them all over with the spiced paste. Fold over the foil, and leave for a few hours or longer, refrigerated if necessary.

Bake the dish - still with the chicken enclosed in the foil - at gas mark 4/180C for 90 minutes, turning the chicken pieces once.

As I’ve noted before of a Madhur Jaffrey dish involving yoghurt, the yoghurt splits. No matter: you can spoon the spicy curds over the chicken, and the rest of the sauce around it.

Lamb with yoghurt, cardomom, and ginger

Baked chicken curry

Kerala fish curry

Jerk chicken

Following recipes, I find, is usually a matter of deciding whether I have the ingredients in the house, whether I can do without the ones I’m missing, and whether I can substitute ingredients I do have for ones the writer recommends. I am too mean to buy items such as allspice berries especially for one dish, because I reckon that the packet may go to waste before I need them again.

Another consideration when adapting Felicity Cloake’s ‘Perfect’ jerk chicken from the Guardian is what high heat does to sugar. The chicken illustrated in the piece is blackened. (I know: the pieces illustrated above look pretty dark; but the photograph has exaggerated the colour.) Soy sauce by itself tends to caramelise, and can burn; sugar will ensure that you get chicken with a burned exterior, particularly if you cook it on the barbecue.

Like many of the recipes involving chillis on this blog, this serves one – the other members of my family would not enjoy it. But the quantities in the marinade may of course be adjusted upwards.

1 spring onion, cut into pieces
2 scotch bonnet chillis, pith (which, rather than the seeds, is the hottest part) removed
1 clove of garlic, cut into pieces
1tsp fresh ginger
1/4tsp allspice
Sprinkling of cinnamon
A couple of gratings of nutmeg
Ground black pepper (to taste)
Salt (to taste)
1tsp soy sauce
1dstsp white wine vinegar (or lemon or lime juice)
1dstsp sunflower oil
2 chicken thighs

Put the spring onion, chillis, garlic, and ginger into an electric vegetable mill. (A food processor is likely to be too large for this modest quantity.) Whizz. You don’t need to create a slush, but can have a mixture in which little pieces of the vegetables are distinct. Stir in the other ingredients, apart from the chicken.

Put the chicken into a bowl or oven dish, and spread the jerk marinade all over it, including under the skin. Leave “for at least six hours”, Cloake says; I left mine for three.

It’s certainly not worth starting a barbecue for one person. I prefer to bake/roast chicken rather than to grill it, liking it tender. So in order to avoid charring the skin, I cooked it covered with foil for an hour at gas mark 4/180C, before uncovering it.

Of course, when I uncovered the dish, I found that my chicken thighs were swimming in liquid. Not to worry: I poured this sauce into a small pan, returned the chicken to the oven, and boiled the sauce until it had a syrupy consistency. Then I spread this syrup on to the chicken, and cooked it, uncovered, for a further 15 minutes, until the marinade had caramelised slightly.

You can never be certain, until you eat them, how hot chillis will be. These were just right. Their zingy heat, combined with the spicy, sour sweetness of the other ingredients, was delicious.

Coronation chicken - an alternative

Easier than coronation chicken, and just as nice.

1.5kg chicken, roasted and shredded
170g Greek yoghurt
2tbsp mayonnaise
2tsp harissa, or other hot sauce, or pesto
1 clove garlic, chopped and crushed with a little salt
Salt and pepper

Mix the chicken with the other ingredients.

Fried chicken - without egg

I read somewhere that it was a solecism, when making southern fried chicken, to dip the chicken in egg before coating it in flour. Flour only, is the rule. I have indeed found that the crusts of my egg/flour fried chicken have been somewhat stodgy.

The coating above consists only of gluten-free flour - which I have found, when making onion bhajis, produces better results than wheat flour – seasoned with salt and a generous quantity of cayenne pepper. I put sunflower oil to a 1cm depth in a frying pan, warmed it over a low to medium heat until a small piece of bread sizzled in it, and fried the chicken pieces with the flame turned right down for 30 minutes, turning once. It was the best I've made.

Spiced chicken with rice and lentils

This is a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe from the Guardian, with a few adaptations. I used dried apricots rather than dates (not because I prefer them, but because I had some in the cupboard), and scaled down the quantities slightly. But I deviated most in my timings and quantities.

First, I made my dish with chicken drumsticks, which I allowed to cook in the spiced stock for 30 minutes before adding the lentils and rice. I like the meat to be very tender. I don't think I used as much as 4tbsp of oil, because the chicken exudes its own fat when frying.

The dish shown in the Guardian appears to be dry, but the quantity of stock specified, 700ml, is a lot more than 150g of rice and 80g of lentils will absorb. I decided to use just enough stock to cover the ingredients. I had to be sure that they would soften under these conditions, so I pre-soaked them (separately) for a couple of hours.

I used green lentils, which - pace Fearnley-Whittingstall - take longer to cook than does rice. I cooked them for 30 minutes, just covered with stock, and checking the liquid level regularly. Then I added the rice, pouring over just enough extra liquid to submerge it. Fearing that the ingredients would stick to the bottom of the casserole if left on the hob, I put the dish in the oven at this point, for a further 20 minutes at gas mark 4/180C.

The rice and lentils absorb all the fat, so be prepared to taste it as you eat them. It's not unpleasant. I'd have liked a little heat in the dish, perhaps from some cayenne pepper.

Coconut chicken curry

This is a one-pot meal, to be served in bowls and eaten with a spoon. What surprised me was that the potatoes took a while to soften - I had thought that the coconut milk would tenderise them, but perhaps I acidified the liquid with the other ingredients. (If you want crunchy potatoes, try cooking them in tomato sauce.) Nevertheless, I think that new potatoes, which hold their shape, are the kind to go for here.

Serves 2, generously.

Spices

1tsp cumin seeds
1/2tsp mustard seeds
6 cardamom pods
1tsp turmeric
1/6tsp asafoetida
1/4tsp dried ginger, or (better) fresh
Cayenne pepper to taste

Sunflower oil
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 tin coconut milk
150ml chicken stock (I confess I used half a cube and 150ml water)
2 sweet peppers, deseeded and cut into fork-sized pieces
8 new potatoes, cut into fork-sized pieces
1 tin chickpeas, drained
Salt
1 large chicken supreme, cut into fork-sized pieces
3 spring onions, chopped
Chillis, chopped
1tbsp lime juice

Warm the cumin and mustard seeds in a saucepan over a gentle heat, until toasted. Grind them, with the cardamom, in a mortar.

In a large saucepan or casserole, warm about 2 tbsps of sunflower oil over a gentle heat, throw in the garlic, and then the onion. Cook gently, stirring, and adding a bit more oil if it threatens to catch. When the onion is soft, tip in the cumin, mustard seeds and cardamom, and cook gently, again stirring, for about three minutes.

Pour in the coconut milk and stock. Add the peppers, potatoes, and chickpeas, as well as the remaining spices. Bring to a simmer, and add salt cautiously (the chick peas will have been canned in salty water, and the stock cube, if you used one, is salty too). Cover, and simmer gently for 15 minutes. Add the chicken and spring onions, and simmer for a further 15 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender and the chicken is cooked through.

Turn off the heat. Stir through the chillis (as many as you like), and the lime juice. Coriander would be nice, too.

Chicken salad with yoghurt and pesto

I am not keen on the flavour of bottled pesto, finding it assertively sharp, with the dusty quality of dried herbs. But used in moderation, with other ingredients, it can offer some zing. New potatoes tossed with mayonnaise and no more than a tsp (for four people) of pesto are very nice. Or there's this simple chicken salad, a change from coronation chicken and much quicker to make.

For four people, I poached eight chicken thighs in water in a covered pan for 75 minutes. (I put onion and peppercorns in the poaching water, and kept it for stock.) I shredded the chicken, and allowed it to cool.

I mixed 1 heaped tbsp of Greek yoghurt, 1 heaped tbsp of (bottled) mayonnaise, 1 tsp of pesto, a clove of crushed garlic, some salt, and a squirt of lemon juice. I tossed the chicken in this mixture.