Roast chicken (and burnt cabbage butter)

Try the grey stuff, it's delicious...

Oct 27, 2023

Welcome back and thank you for joining me here!

This week I want to share the technique I use to make the juiciest, most perfectly seasoned roast chicken. And I’ll also be telling you about a butter flavoured with burnt cabbage that adds a completely delicious and deeply roasted flavour to whatever you cover it with.

I suggest you put it with the chicken but frankly even an old boot would taste good smothered in it…

Anyway, let’s go…

Wil

“Dry brined” Roast chicken

I couldn’t touch raw meat until I was about 15 years old.

Up until that point, because I was1 an absolute tart who was pampered by family, it was one of my three sisters that skinned the chicken breasts for our Thai green curry.

Have you ever seen a film called Withnail and I? Uncle Monty is something of a kindred spirit of mine.

I mention this, not because all recipes are obliged to begin with some passing reference to lost youth, but because it is that “wetness” of a chicken wrapped in plastic for a week that also gets in the way of good cooking.

Chicken skin shouldn’t be wet

A roast chicken is rare treat for me these days. That’s why I enjoy taking the small but meaningful steps required to make that chicken as special as I can. I want flavoursome, tender and juicy meat draped in skin as golden as late autumn sun.

And the first step to getting this is to do something about that water-logged skin.

When I first worked in a restaurant kitchen, I spent a lot of time scraping the fat from the back of chicken skin with a blunt knife. That chicken skin was destined to be roasted and turned super-crispy as part of a chicken liver canape. The fat needed to be removed because it slowed down the process of getting the skin really crispy.

It’s the same for when we’re roasting our chicken. And starting that process when the skin is fresh and wet from the packet makes this process even longer.

The trick is to get your chicken out of any packaging a day ahead of when you’re cooking it and to leave it in the fridge uncovered to dry out.

This also happens to be how long we need to take care of the aforementioned “dry brining”.

Dry brining is the process of rubbing what seems a very generous amount of salt all over your chicken and leaving it for some time (I leave a 1.5kg bird 24 hours) uncovered in the fridge before cooking. For a 1.5kg chicken I use about 15g of salt. I work it all over the legs, under the body, and most importantly under the skin of the breast as well.

There’s no need to rinse it off later. Over those 24 hours the salt penetrates deeply into the flesh. Brining this way helps the meat retain moisture during cooking as well. It’s a fantastic technique and something we did in various forms with our proteins from salmon to pork belly to turkey breasts across all the restaurant kitchens I worked in as a line cook.

After 24 hours of dry brining, the skin of your chicken will, as promised, be dried out and taught across the still juicy flesh like the skin of a drum. This is the state a chicken really should be in to get the crispy golden skin that your roast deserves.

For that 1.5kg chicken I cook it at 230°C for 20 minutes before turning down the oven to 180 for a further 45 minutes. I then follow Simon Hopkinson’s advice and turn the heat off and let the bird sit in the cooling oven with the door ajar for 15 minutes to rest.

Meanwhile, let’s talk about that butter…

Burnt cabbage butter

Again, this is less of a recipe and more a technique, but it’s one that offers so much room for your own creativity.

I am in love with the taste of deeply charred and roasted brassicas. Broccoli, sprouts, cabbage, any of them will do. The flavour they develop when they’ve moved past caramelised and into the arena of the carbonised is just the stuff of dreams to me.

Knowing butter is such a great conduit of flavour, I came up with this “recipe” so I could get that unique flavour integrated throughout my roast chicken dinner.

I started with just a few large leaves of white cabbage, about 100g, and roasted them along with my chicken in the same baking tray.

I took them out when they looked like this…

We have a lot of burnt cabbage here, some just caramelised, some just very well cooked. The important thing is how intense the flavour is as a consequence of the both the colour and how the water has been cooked away. This will also help form a rich, concentrated butter once we blitz it all together.

I blitzed the cooled cabbage in a food processor with 200g of softened salted butter, adding a further pinch of salt (to balance the bitterness of the cabbage) and a dash of vinegar (a teaspoon of apple cider or red wine would be perfect) as it came together.

The result is just lovely. Deeply savoury with marmite and even blue cheese notes. But this technique could transfer really easily to other flavours as well. It’s just a matter of cooking out the water of the thing you wish to flavour your butter with.

Roasted carrots, sliced thinly, would be great. Red peppers cooked slowly in the oven so they start to dehydrate a little perhaps. Roasted or even pan-fried mushrooms, cooked long enough that their moisture has cooked away would be amazing. I might have to try that one soon.

Have some fun with it. And let me know if you try it out.

With our chicken cooked and rested, we are left with some beautiful juices in the bottom of the pan. Once I’ve carved up the bird and plated it out, this is when I use the butter. I top the plated chicken with a modest amount of the butter and, instead of a thick gravy as my British DNA demands, I pour the hot pan juices straight over the butter instead. The butter and chicken juices mix and come together to form a beautiful dressing full of roasted chicken and vegetable flavours. It’s really something else.

The last time I cooked this we had it with sprouts (roasted of course) and mashed potatoes.

I can recommend you do the same

Until next week,

Wil