the SIMMER blog

spatchcock!

Since I already have chicken on the brain, this seems as good a time as any to discuss my favorite food verb of all time: SPATCHCOCK.

Really, it's like butterflying, but you cut all the way through. Also known as "cutting a chicken in half."

But just saying "tonight's chicken will be cut in half" isn't nearly as evocative, is it?

SPATCHCOCK!

Incidentally, besides being fun to say, it helps the chicken cook much faster, and if you're going to serve the darn thing to two people, it's just as easy to cut it beforehand as it is to try to carve the thing afterward. You do need special equipment: a pair of poultry shears. I wouldn't try to hack through a chicken's backbone with your average chef's knife or santoku. The other thing spatchcocking enables you to do is to brown the chicken in a pan on top of the stove before putting it in the oven for roasting. I did a side-by-side test once and at least on my chicken, that step didn't seem to make a bit of difference. This isn't Mythbusters: try it for yourself.

(incidentally, those orange things on the side are carrots that I waffle-cut on the mandoline; that one I can save you the trouble on; don't bother)

no brine before its time

Picking up where we left off... ah yes, the magic of the brine.

So if you put sugar in your brine and you don't rinse it off before roasting, you get that icky burny blackness. Now, some amount of caramelization is good, in general. Roast peppers wouldn't be the same without the char, and just last night I had some out-of-the-world vegetables that had blackened beautifully at the bottom of a roasting pan with lamb at the center. But for chicken, you're not looking for black. You're looking for a gorgeous golden color. And if you can get it, golden and crisp is the goal.

Like this:

 

 

Mmmm, chicken porn.

(let's hope that none of you found this page by Googling "chicken porn"... dude, that's just wrong)

My basic brine for chicken involves 24 hours in the brine -- flipping over halfway through -- and then another 12 hours or so in the fridge uncovered. This air-dries the skin and helps it to get crisp during the roasting. Also helping the crisp factor: high-heat roasting, at 450 degrees.

And the basic brine?

• several cups hot water
• 1/2 c kosher salt
• 1 T peppercorns
• 1 t juniper berries
• 1 t allspice berries
• 6 cloves
• 6 cardamom pods
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 star anise
• 1 vanilla bean
• 1 cinnamon stick

Like I said before, you can nudge the numbers all around on this. Tweak and see what happens. I was surprised, actually, with the dried habanero I added last time -- it didn't seem to have any effect at all in the flavor.

By the way, I apologize for the brine pun, and I promise to cut back on the puns, but hey -- that was pretty restrained when you consider that my brine recipe sometimes includes thyme.

 

brine of the ancient mariner

Yeah, I know. Pun titles. Pfft. But... couldn't resist.

When it comes to roast chicken, I'm a bit of a brine-a-holic. I rarely roast a chicken without soaking it in some kind of salt solution for 24-ish hours beforehand. And I'm not the only one. The interwebs are packed with brine-loving cooks, jostling and refining and experimenting to figure out the best brine recipe and technique.

So writing a post on brine is like writing a post on... I don't know, plot. Far too much to sum up. And for many, a matter of preference.

So this is more of a brine primer. Just the very beginning of the idea.

My usual brine has about a half cup of kosher salt in it, so even 24 hours in the juice isn't too much. A lot of people also put sugar in their brine, but this can be tricky: if you don't rinse the bird off before you roast it, the sugar burns. Then your bird looks like this:

 

Delicious, but burnedish.

I usually also throw in: cracked peppercorns, star anise, cinnamon, cardamom, bay leaves, and a sliced lemon.  I've also tried all of the following: mustard seed, fennel, juniper, allspice, vanilla, rosemary, tarragon. But it's fun to experiment with what you've got on hand. Tonight's brine has chunks of ginger and a dried habanero. We'll see how that goes.

wordless wednesdays reborn