Week 3 of the 2020 Chicken Challenge: Buttermilk Marinated Roast Chicken

Recipe from Samin Nosrat’s “Salt Fat Acid Heat”.          Recipe also available here.

Just look at that bird!

Salt Fat Acid Heat is so much more than a cookbook – it’s a thesis on how these elements work in cooking chemically, how to use them with balance, how these elements play with each other.   It's a book to sit down and read and digest, before you ever get to the recipes.   It's truly an education.

The buttermilk marinated roast chicken is the one recipe this book seems to be known for…..and I had not yet tried it.    So that is this week’s project.

My bird was about 5 lbs - plenty for dinner for the two of us, plus I wanted some leftover cooked chicken for another recipe.    The recipe called for using a 3 ½ to 4 lb chicken, which is typical of a lot of whole chicken recipes – for example, Ina Garten’s million or so whole roasted bird recipes call for that size.

The problem is that most of us who shop at regular grocery stores can’t find whole chickens in that size range.    Most often the available birds are in the 5-7 lb range, which requires tweaking of the recipe – certainly increasing marinades/seasonings/stuffings/cooking time as needed.     It just amuses me that the 3-4 lb chicken is such a prevalent size in whole chicken recipes, yet such a hard size to actually find in the average supermarket.    While I may occasionally go to an Amish market or a butcher to get a high end organic chicken which are far more likely to be these elusive petite birds – that’s a splurge for me.   Like most people, I’m buying most of my meat at an average grocery store.    Ok.  Rant over.   Moving on.

I picked up the chicken about a week or so before I made this because whole birds were on sale – this means I was going to need to freeze it .  I opted to clean the chicken up first, so trimmed extra fat off, took out the innards and decided to spatchcock it.    Cutting out the back and butterflying open the bird makes for a faster, more even roast, and I also felt that it would likely thaw out a bit faster as well.   And I get to use the term spatchcock, which I like to do whenever possible.

Day 1:   Brining.

I thawed the chicken out overnight in the fridge.   The next day, I salted it well, let sit on the counter for a while, then debated about how much to increase the buttermilk-salt brine to accommodate the larger size.    While I’m all about using a proper amount of salt, I decided to just go with the recipe’s amount of salt (I use Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt – here’s why), and increased the buttermilk by ½ a cup.    I felt that it was enough salt for our tastes.

 

The chicken was bagged up, brined, and went back into the fridge for 24 hours.    I gave the bag a shake and flipped it over a couple times during that time period.    The recipe says to put the chicken on a plate, and honestly - this small bird is still too large for that.  I used a standard 9x13 baking dish to make sure there was not leaking issues.

Day 2:    Roasting.

The recipe has you shifting the chicken around in the oven quite a bit while roasting because most ovens cook unevenly.   I skipped that and used the convection setting on my oven, but I did point the legs to the back, because even with a convection fan, my oven tends to run hotter in the back.    I opted to use an enameled cast iron baking dish, a recent purchase that is fast becoming my favorite roasting pan.  (It's a Crofton, if you're interested.   It's about 8 x 12 inches in size.)

Followed the roasting directions otherwise for the recipe.   Given that my chicken was a bit larger than the near-budgie-sized bird the recipes called for, it took a few minutes longer to roast.   

You could really smell the buttermilk while the chicken was roasting - tangy, slightly sour, very aromatic.

The resulting bird was gorgeous, with the sugars in the buttermilk caramelizing until the chicken skin was an other-worldly mahogany.    I mean really - just look how gorgeous this is.   I have never had a chicken that browned like that.

Me being me, after the chicken was out of the oven and rested a few minutes, I snacked on the wings.   Yum - so moist and tender.   The pan juices were amazing as well - you do NOT want to waste them.

Although I'm a dedicated dark meat gal, whenever I roast a chicken a new way, I always cut myself a breast portion.    I *know* that the thighs and legs are going to be tender and juicy and delicious on a roast chicken, no matter how it's prepared.    The breast meat will really tell me what I want to know - are they flavorful and moist as well?   

It was.   Although there's a lot of salt in the recipe, only the snacked wings had a pronounced salty taste.  The tang of the buttermilk is very subtle to almost nonexistent in the resulting roast chicken - but the meat was very flavorful.    I let a piece of the chicken breast I'd cut myself cool off, and it was still moist - I find that sometimes the breast meat will be moist while warm but as it cools off, becomes noticeably drier.   This did not, which is a sign of a good roast.   

The bottom line?  This is a roasted chicken that I was happy to eat.

Keeping things simple, I just put some potatoes in to bake in the oven along with the chicken and steamed some fresh asparagus and made a simple salad.

We only ate about half of the chicken for dinner  - normally, we're pretty happy to just have leftovers the next night.   I have plans for the leftover meat and yes, I sure did save all those gorgeous pan juices as well.   

Overall Rating:  9 out of 10.   This was a delicious roast chicken, and is giving my standard Thomas Keller chicken a run for it's money.    I would love to make this again and then make a gravy out of those pan juices.   

Ease of Preparation:   7 out of 10.   Although relatively simple to make, you do need to plan ahead to give it a full day's brine.    

Will It Freezer Meal?   If you have extra meat & pan juices, you could freeze the leftovers.   I did freeze the bones for future stock.   Buttermilk is something that you can freeze, so in theory, you could freeze the chicken in the marinade - I may experiment with this if I have some leftover buttermilk another time.


Coming up for Week 4:   Quite possibly the best soup I have ever made.