Buttermilk-marinated roast chicken

My sister highly recommended Chef Samin Nosrat's Netflix series Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. I loved it so much that I eventually bought her cookbook. One of the things I love about her is the way she savors and appreciates the food she eats. She makes you want to try it, too. Today I did two of her recipes.


The chicken needs to marinate overnight so get it started the night before you want to eat it. Here's the cast.


Trim off the wing tips and either discard them or save them for stock. It just so happened that I had a pot of stock going so I threw them in.


The chicken is generously salted then left to sit for 30 minutes.


Kosher salt is dissolved in the buttermilk.


Then the buttermilk is poured over the chicken.


You squish it around, place the sealed bag in a bowl and stick it in the fridge overnight. I flipped it a couple of times during the course of its marination period but Samin says that's not necessary.


An hour before I started cooking, I brought the chicken out of the fridge, drained off the buttermilk and left it at room temperature for about an hour. Now, Samin said to remove the buttermilk "without being obsessive." In retrospect, I should have blotted it off better; buttermilk does burn.


I used kitchen twine to truss the legs. The oven was preheated to 425F. The chicken was put in for 20 minutes with the legs facing the back left of the oven. Then the heat was lowered to 400F for another 10 minutes. The pan was then rotated so the legs pointed to the back right of the oven; since the back of the oven is hotter than the middle, the legs would cook at about the same rate as the breast.


Now this is part where the buttermilk issue got me worried. The skin started browning unevenly for one and it got very brown towards the end. Interestingly, as soon as I pulled it from the oven, the skin over the breast meat collapsed in on itself. I let it rest before carving.


The meat was incredibly tender, perfectly seasoned and so juicy! I definitely plan to make it again but regardless of what Samin said, I might have to get obsessive with the buttermilk removal!

Here's the promised link:

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