Archive for April, 2011

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.

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Perfectionism and Poulet Rôti

April 4th, 2011 | Rachel

 

Julia (Child) says the best way to judge a cook is by his or her roasted chicken.  Sure, there are other ways of cooking chicken, like wrapping it in bacon and cooking it rotisserie-style (ummm….yum), but those ways doesn’t require anywhere near the level of oversight as poulet rôti.  Julia says it takes a true perfectionist to get it right.  You have to hover over it, basting it every 8 or so minutes, and the way to know it is done is by the sounds it makes.

I guess you could say I am a bit of a perfectionist.  I particularly enjoy projects that are detail-oriented and that put my obsessive nature to good use.  This is probably why baking was such a natural creative outlet to pick up while I was in law school.  I first dabbled with cake decorating, but quickly grew bored with making cakes out of a box.  Next were cookies and cupcakes, the crowd pleasers.  But when that wasn’t enough, I switched to pies.  Pies combine the art of pastry-making with the endless possibilities of cooking fruits, custards, and creams.

Even though I am used to dealing with finicky recipes, I was nervous about attempting the simple dish of French roasted chicken.  I thought about making it my first dish because it is one of my all-time favorite things to eat, but I got scared I wouldn’t do it justice and my infantile run as an amateur French cook would come to an abrupt halt.  Instead I made the more forgiving boeuf bourguignon.

You see, there is a part of me that believes I can get most things right on the first try.  Call me egotistical — or at the very least overly sure of myself — but I’ve never started a project I couldn’t finish and I’ve never met a recipe I couldn’t make.  When it comes to French roasted chicken, however, that part of my brain was strangely quiet.  It was only with great hesitation that I forced myself to attempt this dish this past Friday night.

The other reason I chose this endeavor for this particular evening is the cook time was only an hour and twenty minutes.  Even with a full day of work, there would be plenty of time to stop by the grocery store and cook in order to have dinner ready at a reasonable hour for my two dinner guests who so kindly agreed to be my guinea pigs.

Getting started with Julia Child and Edith Piaf on Pandora

The makings of roasted chicken

I was about five minutes into the recipe when I realized I overlooked the part in the recipe calling for a carrot and an onion to flavor the chicken.  So, with the oven and chicken ready to go, I ran out the door to the grocery store around the corner.  Buying groceries in the city can be expensive and heavy, but nothing beats beings able to run and grab a few forgotten items from the store and getting back before the end of the next song on the playlist.

Although I ended up with all of the correct ingredients, I still took one shortcut…. I didn’t truss my chicken.  According to the instructions, I am supposed to use a mattress needle to sew up my chicken into a neat, tight bundle of poultry.  I don’t even have string to tie Ms. Poulet’s legs together, much less a six-inch needle.  Julia claims this is done for presentation’s sake, so I skipped over the trussing instructions and focused on the salting and buttering.

The secret ingredient is butter

Julia’s recipe for roasted chicken is simple.  A little bit of salt and layers and layers of butter.  You have to constantly babysit the bird, basting it every 5-8 minutes.  Sounds like a pain, but I assure you the hovering is worth it.  To accompany this dish, I repeated Julia’s buttered potatoes and added roasted tomatoes and buttered green beans.


Roasted tomatoes and buttered green beans

In the end, the chicken wasn’t perfect.  I was running behind schedule, and I quickly learned that trying to entertain guests and cook a French dish for the first time isn’t easy.  Between listening to the chicken and listening to my friends’ stories, I chose the latter.  Perhaps as a result, the chicken ended up far from crispy, although the inside was still moist and delicious.

Crispy or not, we devoured the 3-pound bird, and the stripped carcass is now sitting in my freezing waiting to be turned into chicken stock.

I give myself a C+ on this one.  I am going to have to do some research about chicken skin to figure out why mine wasn’t crispy.  I suspect my oven is not as hot as it should it.  Also, I was paranoid about ended up with dry chicken (what greater sacrilege could there be than a dry chicken?), so I took it out probably ten minutes too soon.  But, like I said, it was still delicious.

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