Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Salt water chicken
I can’t believe I haven’t blogged this. I MUST have blogged it. But I just did a search, and came up empty-handed.
This is so simple: it’s a simplified version of Julia Child’s roast chicken recipe.
1. Make some brine. I use one heaping tablespoonful of kosher salt and four cups of water.
2. Rinse your chicken and put it in a garbage bag. Set the garbage bag in a big glass bowl. Fill the bag with the four cups of brine. If you like, you can add other things to the brine, such as peppercorns, rosemary, bay leaves. But I really don’t think it makes much difference. Tie off the bag and put the whole thing in the fridge.
3. I usually remove the giblets from the cavity and add those to the bag, too.
4. Leave the chicken in the fridge overnight. This is a very mild brine, so don’t expect 1-2 hours to do it for you.
5. Preheat oven to 425 to 450 F.
6. Coat a casserole dish with olive oil and then add vegies to the dish. Usually, I peel one potato and cut it into big (3/4 inch high) disks, and then I chop one yellow onion and add it to the dish, too. Portabella mushrooms are nice. Today, for the first time, I used a combination of chunks of butternut squash and chopped red bell pepper. It’s all good. Whatever you use will take on the loveliest flavor from the chicken.
Anyway, what you’re doing is building up a platform upon which your chicken will sit. Stir the vegies in the oil, flip the potatoes, add salt and pepper to taste. Place the chicken, back-side-up, on this platform.
7. Brush the chicken with a combination of olive oil and melted butter. Salt and pepper to taste. Pop it in the oven.
8. At 15 minute intervals, brush the chicken with more butter and olive oil. When you have sufficient drippings from the roasted chicken, you can brush with this instead.
9. When the chicken is nicely browned, usually after 30-45 minutes, flip it. The breast side will then brown fairly quickly, usually in no more than thirty minutes.
10. Remove from oven, rest, carve, voila!
Gizzards cooked in this manner (in the bottom, along with the vegetables) will be gloriously tender, not the chewy horrors you’re imagining right now. Livers tend to overcook. Necks are delicious.
The vegies are always great. The drippings are useful, too: you’ll have a combination of highly concentrated chicken stock with a top layer of fat (which is butter + olive oil + chicken fat). I usually save both for use in other dishes.
Julia Child is insistent about the baste-every-fifteen-minutes thing. I’ve left this in the oven for a half hour at a time, no basting, and it does very well. Brining is your insurance against a dry bird.
By the way, I’ve done this with Thanksgiving turkey, too. Takes a special kind of refrigerator to accommodate a turkey in brine, but it’s worth it. Best bird you’ll ever eat, and I don’t even like turkey.
Bon appetit!
D.
To brine a turkey (I do this every year at Christmas), you can put your brine-filled garbage bag into a large cooler. Layer some ice packs on top of the closed garbage bag to keep everything nice and cold (just make sure your brine solution has cooled off before you add the turkey). Nigella Lawson recommends adding a quartered orange to the brine. I tried it last year, and it did add a nice flavour to the bird.
Sounds delicious but I was always told not to use garbage bags for brining because the plastic is not “food grade” and can leach harmful chemicals and dyes into the brine. Maybe I am overreacting, but you can read about it here: http://www.virtualweberbullet.com/plastics.html
Dear Sir:
I tried yr recipe, and it didn’t work too well.
I didn’t have any salt, so I hunted around the kitchen and found some similar looking crystals in a bottle labeled drain cleaner.
The garbage bag worked ok, but after I emptied it I had a big pile of garbage in the middle of the kitchen floor. This made the rest of the process slower because I had to step around it. Also rats came.
Should I have rinsed the garbage bag out? The coffee grounds gave the chicken an interesting texture.
I should mention that I didn’t have a chicken so I used a raccoon. I found it on the side of the road. I’m not sure I understood your recipe though, the fur soaked up most of the brine. I didn’t have any peppercorns so I added some creamed corn.
When it came time to roast it I didn’t have any olive oil so I used a little 90w gear oil. Also I didn’t have any butter so I used some cheese since it comes from a cows udder, same as butter. To avoid messing up the recipe I used velveeta.
I didn’t have many veggies, just a potato, so I put that in the pan and put in the rest of the creamed corn and 1/2 jar of sweet gherkins I had left over from Christmas. And 3/4 can of tomato paste. I don’t know how long it was in the fridge but I scraped off the hard part.
I basted it every 15 minutes like you said, and it still tasted like hell.
Please fix your recipe.
Lucie: thanks . . . now what am I gonna brine my bird in?
Dean, how does Chris put up with you?
Sometimes I wonder the same thing.
She didn’t think your chicken recipe was good either. She particularly didn’t like how the velveeta clumped in the chicken’s fur.
“This is Doug’s recipe?” she asked me.
“Yep,” I said. “I followed it carefully, only changed a couple of things.”
“Who piled the garbage in the middle of the floor?” she asked.
“Doug’s recipe said to,” I replied.
OK, now everyone in the office is staring at me, wondering why I’m clutching my ribs with tears rolling down my cheeks.
Thanks, guys.
Dean, I’m all in favor of altering recipes, but generally speaking that advice does not include roadkill.