Paper Palate

As I mentioned in my bio, before my mother sent me into the wilderness that is post adolescent life; she provided me with three recipes — how to roast a chicken, how to make a stock from the carcass and how to make a chicken and rice porridge from the leftovers. While I no longer roast chickens according to my mother’s instructions, I still tend to use the idea of a roast chicken as the base metric by which I have judged the cookbooks that I’ve bought. After all, it’s a simple yet endlessly variable dish, open to all sorts of personal and regional interpretations — a culinary Rorscach test where cooks can impose their own vision of a perfectly cooked bird.

To start with the basics, the Larousse Gastronomique, the reference that catalogues definitive techniques with an obsessive compulsiveness that seems vaguely uncharacteristic of the French (more Teutonic, really) dictates that a chicken should be roasted at 400F with the breast side initially down, then turned at the halfway point. Total roasting time would be roughly 20 minutes per pound. Basting is recommended but optional; as is trussing. It’s simple, gets the job done, but it leaves you a bird with chewy, but not crisp, skin and breast meat that is dangerously close to dry.

Now contrast this with Ming Tsai’s Roast Chicken with Sticky Rice Stuffing, from his Blue Ginger cookbook. Here, he has you prepare a rice and scallion stuffing, while roasting the chicken at 550 degrees breast up for 25 minutes. Then, he instructs you to lower the oven heat to 325 degrees, pull the bird out then stuff the steaming hot cavity. Granted he also recommends using rubber gloves as insulation. But still, most folks lack the heat tolerance of a food professional who’s spent hours around salamanders and industrial burners. For most of us mere mortals, the concept of stuffing a chicken fresh from a 550 degree oven doesn’t just evoke the words ‘arms reach’, so much as evoking welder’s masks and a blacksmith’s apron. Finally, he has you shield the stuffed chicken with foil, and roast it for another 45 minutes to an hour longer. It’s slower and marginally more complicated, but it does yield a juicy bird with good stuffing — which is what one would expect from a cookbook from a restaurant specializing in complicated food. If anything, it’s a decent reminder of why some of us like to pay others to manhandle a steaming 550 degree bird in our stead.

A little more reasonable is Mark Bittman’s approach in How To Cook Everything where you start with a searingly hot 500F oven, roast the bird breast side down for 20 minutes, baste with olive oil, then wait another 7 to 8 minutes, turn the breast side up then reduce the heat to 325 degrees and cook until juices run clear. It’s still reliant on having a reliable oven that can dump heat quickly enough; and more times than not, I’ve found that the heat sends the olive oil past its smoke point, and I’d have to split my time with turning the bird and soothing a disturbed smoke detector.

For these recipes, the logic behind starting off with a high temperature and then turning the bird while reducing the cooking temperature is to ensure thorough, even cooking of the white and dark meat. Since the portions cook at different times, keeping the oven at a straight 400 will typically result in overdone, cardboard white meat or underdone, bacteria-ridden dark meat. Starting the chicken breast side down will expose more of the thighs to heat first and starting at a high temperature gives them a bit of a head start. Turning the bird then allows you to finish cooking the breasts, while lowering the heat affords a certain margin for error. The main drawback for this method, though, is that you can’t get a good, crispy skin at temperatures below 400 degrees.

The finish-on-a-high-note approach is forwarded in The Cook’s Illustrated Best Recipe book, which recommends roasting at 375 degrees for 30 minutes, then searing it with a 25 minute sprint at 450 degrees. The Cooks twist is that, rather than stick to the conventional breast-down-breast-up rotation method, they adopt a three turn technique, roasting the chicken with one wing side up for 15 minutes, then rotating the other wing side up, and finishing with the bird breast up. They also argue against basting, saying that it’s a relatively superfluous technique that just leads to greasy and unappealing skin.

Anthony Bourdain, in his Les Halles Cookbook, uses a similar temperature progression to the Cooks folks - 375F for 30 min., 450 for 25. Yet, he diverges from others in that he omits turning the bird. You just stuff the chicken with half an onion, a lemon and a couple of sprigs of rosemary and thyme, and cook breast side up then baste halfway. Though, frankly, given Cooks’ advice, even the basting part can be skipped and you can avoid opening the oven for the entire length of the cooking time. Just wander off for 30 minutes, enjoy a glass of wine, come back, turn the heat up a bit, then finish the bottle. Sounds rather civilized, doesn’t it? I assume that he doesn’t prescribe turning the bird because nobody cares if the back is a little underdone. Besides, that’s more flavor for the stock, and if you’re not the kind of person who picks at the back then no harm, no foul, right? Right…

So, what sorts of sweeping generalizations does one draw from these various approaches? The Larousse - straightforward but a little too much so. Celebrity chefs like Ming Tsai? Complicated and highly-engineered. Mark Bittman? Not big on crispy skin, but big on making sure that you’re not feeding your kids salmonella. Cook’s Illustrated? Good skin, but keep the oven mitts handy. Anthony Bourdain? Good skin, good juice, and the bacteria that doesn’t kill you will make you stronger; which is not surprising for a cookbook which also has a recipe for steak tartare.

Sure, this sort of post doesn’t apply to vegetarian or Asian cookery, but the idea is that if you master and understand one or two common recipes, you can use that as a reference point to assess other cookbooks that you might buy in the future. Judge the text not as a customer but as a peer, feel free to argue with it and disagree if need be. Then you can actually decide on whether its a good book or not, rather than relying on secondary but basically non-essential qualities like whether it has pretty photos or a nice binding.