Serious Eats: Recipes
Essentials: Roast Chicken
Roasting chicken always, always reminds me of Jeffrey Steingarten. I think the moment my crush on him bloomed into undying love was when I read his essay “As the Spit Turns” in the August 1999 issue of Vogue (reprinted in It Must’ve Been Something I Ate), in which he discusses his efforts to rig up an effective spit-roasting system at home. Two passages near the beginning won me over: “Whenever I have nothing better to do, I roast a chicken. …I’ll roast a chicken in the afternoon even when I am not hungry and have plenty of food in the fridge and a reservation for dinner. It’s like a hobby.” And then, “The great Brillat-Savarin declared, ‘We can learn to be cooks, but we must be born knowing how to roast.’ I often lie awake nights worrying about whether I was born to roast.’” I like a man who has his priorities in order. It is in this spirit that I offer you Marcella Hazan’s beautifully simple bird stuffed with two lemons. I suspect that many of you already love this very recipe, and if you do not know it yet, that you, too, are always tinkering with roast chicken, perhaps even roasting a bird whenever you have nothing better to do.
I have never managed to roast a chicken to Steingarten’s exact specifications (“Dark and crispy skin, intensely savory, covering every square millimeter of the bird with no unsightly white patches”), a shame because I love crispy poultry skin as much as the next glutton. It’s something to strive for, but is it not impossible to cry over skin that is flabby here and there when the roasted flesh beneath it is so uniformly juicy and delicious? It was once my habit to massage a bird with butter and salt and pepper and stuff it with garlic and lemon before roasting it on a bed of vegetables, but a year or two ago the recipe below won me over with its effective simplicity: chicken, lemon, salt, pepper. I don’t bother with trussing, but I do flip the roast midway through cooking: it isn’t too much trouble, and it does get good results. A 12-inch cast-iron skillet has been my roasting pan ever since I first made Zuni roast chicken.
Though I am fairly certain I was not born to roast—my reliance on meat thermometers suggests that I am not a natural—I see no reason to stop working towards that crispy, thoroughly bronzed goal. After all, it’s a great hobby.
About the author: Robin Bellinger recently escaped a career in book publishing, which was cutting into her cooking time. Now she's a freelance editor and can bake bread on Tuesday afternoon if she feels like it. She lives in Midtown Manhattan with her husband and blogs about cooking and crafting at home*economics.
Roast Chicken with Lemons
Adapted from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking