Roast Chicken

This recipe by Thomas Keller is supposed to be the best roast chicken of all time. It is also simple, so I'm giving it a try.

Random comment: All the experts say don't wash your chicken because it will spread germs around the sink area. So how do you get the chicken out of the sealed plastic bag it is shrink wrapped in with lots of juices? Use the sink I guess :-).

OK, I've got my publix chicken out of the plastic, dried off, salted and trussed. The biggest pain was getting the wishbone out, but I finally succeeded. Because it is supposed to be dry, dry, dry, I've got it in the pan on a rack, and I've taken the crisper drawer out of the fridge and stashed the pan and the chicken in it's place to get dry overnight. (It got drier, but lots of juice was in the bottom of the pan, and it still felt damp to the touch, but I guess that is as dry as it is gonna get.)

Video for wishbone removal and trussing from Jacques Pépin

Video on probe position for roasting is here. (Between leg and breast and into thick part of thigh.)

Plan for tomorrow: Add pepper, let sit at room temperature while pre-heating oven to 450. Plug temperature monitor in and set it for 155, take it out when alarm goes off, let the temp coast up and the chicken rest, then see if I can carve two beautiful half chicken slabs off either side (did leg/thigh as one piece, wing as another, then big hunk of breast as the third, plus random bits and pieces of shreds removed and gobbled up).

The one probe I inserted didn't leave the rest of the chicken cooked enough, had to check different spots with the hand held probe a couple of times and put it back in for a few minutes. The breast temp when I took it out for the last time was 168 which was a little higher than the recommended 165, but it seemed fine. The probe in the thigh I inserted at the start read 175 by the time the breast hit that 168 mark.

P.S. If I go to all this trouble and it is no better than the Publix rotisserie chickens, I probably won't be making this again :-).

Results: Very good juicy and tender chicken. Definitely better than a grocery store rotisserie chicken, but was it enough better to be worth making instead of buying? It was a pain to make and to clean up after. Might do it again, but not very often.

I'm also making chicken stock with the carcass and bones along with random stuff I had in the fridge(onion, carrot, parsley - didn't have any celery, so I added celery seed). Six cups of water in the instant pot for 25 minutes. I'll see how it goes.

Two large mason jars of stock (and more clean up to do). It isn't awful, but would probably taste better if I had the more traditional veggies to include.

Next day, reheated the remaining chicken in air fryer at 350 degrees for 5 minutes. Worked well, the skin got crisped up again after getting soggy in the aluminum foil wrapping and it was just as juicy as yesterday.