So it turns out I had my aphorisms all mixed up. How embarrassing.
It turns out that the old saying actually goes: “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” which has nothing to do with roasting chickens. And when you type “There’s more than one way to roast” in a Google search bar, the predictive text that the Google algorithm thinks you want to search for is “a reindeer.”
Who says, “There’s more than one way to roast a reindeer”?
Apparently it’s from an episode of Fringe and no one in Finland has ever said that.
But you get the gist, right? There are multiple ways to cook poultry. Some are better than others.
There’s the classic Christmas-style roast where you start at high heat with or without aluminium foil, then reduce to lower heat, remove the foil and baste the skin regularly. It takes hours. And then all you do is complain about dry breast meat. It’s a tradition.
There’s the slow-cooker way that yields perfectly succulent breast and leg meat but gelatinous skin and is essentially not a roast.
There’s rotisserie, which would be lovely if I happened to have one of those at-home rotisserie units sitting next to my food processor, above my blender and crammed behind my ice cream maker. Might as well throw in a centrifuge, for goodness sake.
But what if there were a way that didn’t take forever, yielded succulent breast and thigh meat and didn’t require an international holiday to make worthwhile?
That would be brining, which I did for Thanksgiving a couple years ago for the first time. There are two basic kinds of brine: wet brines and dry brines. I wet brined, which means I stuck a giant turkey in a giant pot of salted water, essentially.
It was all kinds of hassle.
First you have to measure the correct ratio of salt to water, depending on the size of your pot and chicken. Then you have to bring all that water to a boil to dissolve the salt. Then you have to let it cool to room temperature or colder before adding the chicken and placing it in the fridge. And you need a pot and fridge big enough to store the chicken overnight. If you don’t, you risk either cooking the meat or, worse, creating the perfect environment for bacteria to grow. Food poisoning does not make for a fun holiday.
But the results are great, when safe. I loved wet brining so much started getting creative with cooling the brine. I’d dissolve the salt in less water than called for then add ice cubes to speed the cooling process.
Then I heard that wet brining was for chumps. Turns out dry brining is the star. Why? Because according to the website and food lab Serious Eats, with wet brining you lose more chicken juices that leach out with the brine as the chicken cooks. And you mask a lot of chicken flavour. So it’s good for flavourless chicken from a factory farm but it would be cruel to wet brine that never-frozen, free-range, heritage breed chicken from the farmer’s market.
And dry brining is so much easier. All you do is rub salt all over the bird and under the skin and leave it overnight. Or two nights. Modernist Cuisine would tell you to inject just enough wet brine into the bird so it retains enough moisture and better infiltrates the flesh, but I don’t happen to have needles hanging around and don’t intend to go to my neighbourhood clinic in search of them any time soon.
But wait! There’s more!
Since you brined, there’s significantly less chance that the bird will dry out during roasting. So there’s no need to baste, and you can roast it at a higher temperature, aka faster.
Didn’t you mention something about spatchcocking?
Yes! That’s the proven theory that if you slice open the rib cage of the chicken and press it flat, the chicken cooks more evenly and, again, faster. All you need is a sharp knife. And as with any kind of brine, the gravy you make from the juices will be salty and delicious. And the skin will be heavenly – crispy, salty and savoury.
Here’s the science of wet brining vs. dry brining.
Here’s everything on how to dry brine.
And here’s everything on spatchcocking.
It’s so simple that you’ll never want to roast a plain chicken again. You do need to think ahead 12-18 hours for the brining, but it’s worth it. And besides, what are you doing with your Saturday night if not thinking of spatchcocking?
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