ROAST CHICKEN
Athens, Georgia; February 28, 2025:
I guess it is a bit ridiculous to write about roast chicken since so many others have already tackled the subject. But everyone has a different take on fowl. Laurie Colwin, the novelist who penned for Gourmet for many years before her untimely death, wrote that roast chicken is “the perfect dish no matter what the circumstances.”
Simon Hopkinson, the renowned British chef, declared in Roast Chicken and Other Stories (Random House, 1994) that a poor cook will produce a poor dish, even if using poulet de Bresse, the French bird considered the finest in the world. He slathers his with a quarter pound of butter and roasts it at 450°F for ten or fifteen minutes, bastes the bird, reduces the heat to 375°F, and continues cooking it for another 30-45 minutes, basting occasionally. Colwin slow-roasts hers between 250° and 300°F for three hours, basting constantly. Like my mother and grandmother, she calls for a three-pound bird. Hopkinson cooks a four-pound bird, but he has access to the wonderful chickens of England, some as lovely as those from Bresse. Many are roosters, not Colwin’s “hens.” Both call for “free-range” birds, but the term is misleading. It’s mostly marketing jargon. One thing’s for sure: you don’t want an old yard hen, because no matter how you cook it, it will be tough. In Genoa, Italy, where I used to live, galletto alla piastra, also known as pollo al mattone (chicken under a brick) or pollo alla pietra (chicken under a stone), is a regional favorite. It requires a young rooster. (Livornese chickens are to Italians what the poulets de Bresse are to the French.) I have written before about the dish here on the blog. The essay was included in Charleston to Phnom Penh: A Cook’s Journal, the anthology of my work recently published by the University of South Carolina Press.
I have roasted dozens and dozens of chickens over the years. I’ve bought kosher and halal chickens, which are slaughtered according to religious laws. They are salted before processing. I have brined chickens in saline solutions containing any number of flavorings. I have bathed the birds in both butter and oil.I have stuffed them with oranges, cornbread, onions, lemons, and herbs. I have tucked herbs and truffles under the skin. I have dried them for 24 hours in the refrigerator. And I have roasted them at just about every temperature you can imagine, though, like Barbara Kafka, whose seminal cookbook, Roasting (Wm. Morrow, 1995), I prefer simple preparations and very high heat. “When in doubt,” she wrote, “ROAST A CHICKEN. When hurried, roast a chicken. Seeking simple pleasure? Roast a chicken.”
But how? Even in her Food for Friends (Harper & Row, 1984), her chicken (five pounds, stuffed with lemon, garlic, orange, onion, and butter) is roasted in a 500°F oven for 45 minutes to an hour. She doesn’t truss the bird, which, she says, “insulates the thighs and makes them take yet longer to cook. That is the sure way to have dry white meat and red blood at the thigh joint. Do it my way and the bird may look vaguely drunk and obscene but it will be properly roasted. I also don’t cook my chicken on a rack as my friend James Beard does, nor do I turn it from side to side. Occasionally, at the beginning of the roasting, I give the pan a good hard shake so that the chicken doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan.” Kafka removes the fat from the crop of the bird before cooking.
Ann Willan, the founder and director of Paris’s famous La Varenne cooking school, trusses her birds, but agrees that the “French method of roasting poultry in a fairly high heat is the most successful.” When roasted in lower heat, “the bird tends to stew in its juices.”
I no longer remember where or when I first heard of roasting a chicken on a bed of celery in a cast iron pan. Nothing could be simpler, or more delicious:
First, find a chicken that is no more than three pounds. Do NOT remove the fat from the crop. I brine the bird for an hour and half in a simple saline solution to cover (¼ cup of salt to a quart of water). Cool room temperature is fine if you are going to cook the bird immediately afterwards. Otherwise, brine it in the refrigerator, then remove it and drain it an hour before putting it in the oven. Pat the bird dry inside and out. You do not need to truss the legs, but I sometimes truss them loosely as I did in this photo.
Heat the oven to 475°F. Place two or three or four sticks of celery in a cast iron pan and balance the bird on top, breast up. Roast it for 35 to 45 minutes or until a meat thermometer stuck deep into the breast without hitting the bone registers at least 150°F. (The USDA recommends 165° but the bird will continue cooking while it rests.) The skin should be perfectly crisp. Let the chicken rest for ten minutes while you deglaze the pan with some Vermouth or white wine.
The breasts of small, naturally raised birds in the US will cook up moist and will be delicious without it, but I like to nap the breast meat with the deglazed sauce. The celery is flavorful as well. Serve whatever piece of the chicken you want with lightly dressed arugula and Dijon mustard. Here I have also made cornbread dressing, also drenched in the sauce of pan drippings.
I served the chicken with a remarkable Costières de Nîmes, made with Grenache Blanc and Roussanne. A simply perfect meal.