The quest for perfection continues…
April 5th, 2011 | Rachel
I gave the chicken another try. If I hadn’t worked until midnight tonight, I was going to give a third attempt. In fact, I am going to keep roasting chickens until I figure out how to achieve a perfect, crispy skin.
Yesterday, my friend Maria and I attended a wine class at New York Vintners. This wine shop shows up on Groupon every now and then, and they let you stock up on half-off wine classes. Yesterday’s class was entitled “Bad Ass Reds.” We sampled some bold reds from around the globe, and I walked away with eight bottles of wine for my meager collection (an underground wine cellar is on the list of must-haves for my French maison). I also learned that the Bandit (Three Thieves) boxed wine I’ve been purchasing from Fresh Direct is considered to be highly decent and superior to other cheap mass productions like Yellow Tail.
At some point we decided we needed some French food to go with all the wine in our bellies. Maria agreed to be my sous chef, so we schlepped our bottles of wine back to my place and then picked up another bird from the grocery store. The nice part about roasting chickens is the chickens are pretty cheap. Both of the chickens I bought this weekend cost around $8-9 and fed three people. They’d probably be even cheaper if I was open to the idea of eating a chicken that has been fed other chickens. I try and stick to the vegetarian-fed, free-range, comes-with-a-pedigree chickens. The most expensive part of my two roasted chicken dinners was actually the tomatoes on Friday. Two pounds of them cost me ten bucks. I don’t know what the going rate for tomatoes is, but that seems a little steep.
I’m getting up close and personal with our chicken while Maria peels the carrots
We had a fun time cooking, and I managed to remember to do all of the things that I forgot to do the last time (except trussing the bird… I don’t know where to begin looking for a mattress needle). In the end, the chicken was absolutely delicious, but just as before the skin was not crispy. I followed everything I was supposed to do, so I am not sure what the deal is.
I’ll give it a B- this time, although Maria gets an A+ for doing all of the peeling, chopping and dicing. At this rate, you’ll all get a chance to try my chicken before I figure out what is going wrong.
Bandit boxed wine is surprisingly good. I also usually luck out with cheap wines on Fresh Direct, but my last bottle of Argentinian white was almost undrinkable.
Look up the Zuni Cafe method for roasting a chicken–it’s the BEST way to get a crispy, perfect bird. The key is to really dry it with paper towels before roasting and to flip it during its cooking to let the skin crisp on all sides.
[…] have been with me since the beginning of this blogging endeavor, then you might remember a quick succession of attempted roasted chickens. (Wow, was that really six months […]