Long over-due for cooking new dishes! The last 2 months had been crazy busy for me. I went on a 3.5 week vacation, 1 week for work training, and then took another short trip. Finally I have returned back home for the holidays and had have the luxury to cook again.
This is one of the dishes I cooked for our Christmas dinner this year. This skillet roasted chicken was featured in the front cover of the Bon Appetit magazine which was lent to be from one of my favorite colleagues who was dying to share this with me when he first saw it. This skillet roasted chicken is from the #1 restaurant in the States. With this hype, I gotta try it out right?
I have never really roasted a whole chicken at home before. It always seems like roasting a whole chicken is a very troublesome process which involving preparing the whole chicken all the way to cleaning up the oven after all the splattering of the chicken oil. This recipe is a bit different than others I have looked at before. The key to this dish is prepoaching the chicken in an immersion circulator: cooking the chicken sous vide (French for “under vacuum”). This restaurant technique locks in moisture and keeps the food in contact with flavor-boosting seasonings. The vacuum-sealed item (usually protein) is poached in a bag at a low, controlled temperature that ensures optimum doneness. So the trick to this recipe is the “hot-water baths” used before the chicken is placed into the oven. Since most home cook at home don’t have a immersion circulator, this recipe teaches us a home-cook friendly method to get an almost-perfect vacuum inside an everyday resealable plastic bag (please look at the step 4 below to show you how).
Ingredients
· 1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
· 3 Tbsp. chopped fresh chives
· 2 Tbsp. chopped fresh thyme
· 1 Tbsp. chopped fresh Chervil (I actually skipped this one as I couldn’t find it in the super market)
· 1 Tbsp. chopped flat-leaf parsley
· 1 Tbsp. chopped fresh tarragon
· 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
· 1 tsp. finely grated lemon zest
· ½ tsp. freshly ground black pepper
· 1 (2-3lbs) chicken, halved
· 2 ½ tsp. kosher salt
Procedures
1. Whisk 1/3 cup oil oil, 1 Tbsp. chives and next 7 ingredients in a medium bowl.
2. Divide marinade between 2 (gallon-size) resealable plastic freezer bags.
3. Season chicken with 2 ½ tsp. salt, place 1 chicken half in each bag. Seal bag, release excess air, chill overnight.
4. Place bags side by side in a large pot. Add cold water to cover by 2’’. Heat water over medium heat until an instant-read thermometer registers 150 degree.
5. Turn off heat, cover, and poach chicken for 50 minutes.
6. Transfer bags to a large bowl of ice water to cool, about 15 minutes. Remove the chicken from bags; pat dry.
7. Preheat oven to 450 degree.
8. Heat vegetable oil in a large cast-iron skillet over high heat. Add chicken halves, skin side down, so chicken sits against sides of pan. Cook, moving chicken occasionally for even cooking, until skin is browned all over. Flip chicken and transfer skillet to oven. (note that I skipped this instead as I didn’t want to get the kitchen all smoky. As a result, I had to leave my chicken in the over longer (about 28 minute in the oven instead of 15 minutes)
9. Roast until an instant-read thermometer inserted into thickest part of thight registers 165 degree, about 15 minutes. Let rest for 10 minutes.
Again, since I skip the skillet procedure, I had to leave my chicken in the oven to cook longer. I first tried 20 minute and the chicken was still a bit red in the inside and not too brown on the outside so I let it cooked for another 8 minute then it turn out almost perfect – got a nice brown coding outside and still very juicy inside the meat. I think the poaching procedures works very well on the chicken in order to give it moisture and tenderness. So the extra pre-poaching step here it’s actually worth a try!
