Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Tony's Food 201: The Whole Chicken and it's After Effects

We're upping the course difficulty here in the New Year. Today, we're going to taken on an entire chicken.


Figure 10.p - Per my girlfriend, we apparently have a bright future of chicken-raising ahead of us. Our six future-chickens' names are (as decided by a committee made up of me, my girlfriend, my college friends, and a good deal of home-made pumpkin vodka): Henrietta, Gertrude, Nugget, Minerva, Galadriel and Cluck-cluck. (http://www.windsorfamilyfarm.com/)

Okay, I lied. Cooking a whole chicken isn't really all that difficult. I usually just throw it in an oven and call it roasting. What to do with it afterwards is where things get complex. It basically breaks down into two broad categories: meat and other. What to do with the meat is easy, you eat it. Plain chicken can get mind-numbingly boring, so we'll address that two ways: how to get piles of flavor into the chicken pre-roasting, and interesting things to do with all that bird. Turns out, what to do with the "other" category is pretty easy too, and we'll get to that in this article as well.

Whole Roast Chicken

  • One whole "roaster" chicken, these are generally larger than the fryers. Remove the packaging, pull the packet of miscellaneous parts out of the cavity, rinse the whole thing in side and out
  • Two whole lemons, cut longitudinally into long wedges
  • 8-10 cloves of garlic, smashed with the flat side of a knife and your hand.
  • What ever herbs you feel like using. I generally switch it up based on season - sage and rosemary in the cold months; thyme and bay leaves in the warmer months. Chili peppers would be a good match with the lemons and the bay.
  • A bag of fingerling potatoes
  • Two white or yellow onions cut into quarters.
  • Salt and pepper.

After the chicken is all rinsed, pat the entire inside and outside with sea salt and coarse ground black pepper. Stuff the cavity full of lemon wedges, garlic cloves and herbs, but leave a few of each aside. Make some cuts into the skin on the breast side of the chicken and stuff herbs and garlic cloves in there as well. Make a couple more cuts in the skin on the folds of the wings, and put a lemon wedge in each fold, under the skin, as well as any garlic and herbs you can fit in there. A certain obese celebrity chef and enemy of public health does something similar, but rather than using herbs, she crams lumps of butter under the skin. Tie the legs together over the opening of the cavity with twine. I generally put mine in a shallow pyrex casserole dish, but feel free to put it on a roasting rack over a roasting pan. It will be dryer, you may need to baste it. Arrange the potatoes and onions around the chicken. Bake for about 2 hours depending on the size of the bird in question, and how long the package tells you to roast it.

Okay. So now you've had a meal with some delicious lemony, herby, garlicky chicken and sides. Now you have a pile of lemony, herby, garlicky white and dark meat, and a pile of bones, cartilage, skin and fat. Oh, and that packet of miscellaneous parts you pulled out at the get-go. The meat you can just eat as is, until of course you get bored with it like I usually do. The rest of the creature is the problem. This is where home-made chicken stock comes in.

Taking Stock of the Situation. (no, not that Situation).

Basically, take everything that you roasted that's not chicken meat, onions, potatoes and lemons and throw it into your biggest pot. Throw the lemons out, they will make your stock bitter. Add in whatever roasted herbs and garlic you recover from the pan. You can add new onions and maybe even carrots and celery if you like, but it's not necessary. There should already be salt and pepper inside the cavity and on the skin. Cover it to about 2-3 inches above the mess with cold water and let it simmer on the stove for 3-4 hours. Do not boil it, this will make it extraordinarly cloudy. When you're done, strain it and put it into what ever containers you have on hand. Mine mostly goes into old Cool-Whip containers and then into the freezer. You can use it in soups, to flavor rice, really anything.

Doing Something Different with What You've Got

Okay, there are only so many times a person can eat plain roast chicken. Yes, even if you've gussy-ied it up with various and sundry aromatic plants. So what to do with all your new-found poultry wealth? I usually end up making some sort of salad from the meat for sandwiches for my lunch. One of my favorites is a Provencal version, which includes the chicken (obviously) chopped fine with a knife for food processor, mayonaisse, a couple spoons of olive tapenade, cherry or grape tomatoes cut into sub-bite-sized pieces, and any other vegetables I have lying around: carrots, celery, red onion all work nicely, all chopped just as fine as the chicken. It makes a mean sandwich to bring for lunch, all the other flavors mask how sick of the chicken you are, and gives you some lean protein and raw veggies in your diet. Sure beats some of the alternatives out there.

So you have the assignment for the week, as well as a couple homework projects to keep you busy in the kitchen as well. See you all back here next week for one last thing to do with your left over chicken.