Serious Eats: Recipes
Dinner Tonight: Brick Chicken
What most people want in a roast chicken is crispy skin and succulent meat. Is it too much to ask? They want the leg to be done cooking before the breast gets tough; they want the skin to be as dry and crackly as possible while everywhere else should be moist and tender. Roasting a chicken is the attempt to achieve all of these contradictory elements in one place, and to do so with a limited number of variables: heat, time, salt. I love the challenge, the concept, the simplicity of roasting a whole bird. But I recently made a dish that in some ways made the whole chicken-roasting problem moot.
That's because cooking a butterflied whole chicken "under a brick" gives you that crispy skin, succulent meat, and takes half the time as roasting. I'd heard of this process, but was reminded while reading a series of posts on Grocery Guy, who adapted it from the kitchen of Marlow & Sons in Brooklyn. He recommends halving the chicken and carefully carving all the meat off to achieve perfect boneless presentation. But I also read that you can simply cut out the chicken's backbone, which allows it to flatten (called "spatchcocking"). Into a heavy heated skillet it goes skin side down, then you put as much weight on top as possible--if not literally a couple bricks wrapped in tin foil, then another skillet with all the cans you can safely stack in it. The skin crisps to a glorious brown under all that weight in its own rendered fat and juices--rather than drying in the oven's air as it would during roasting. The meat stays moist. The taste is fantastic. I'm a convert.