JWK1
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- Joined
- Apr 26, 2015
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I was really excited to try this as my wife and I love roasted chicken. The whole concept of flattening out the bird, cooking it faster with better overall browning, and having the white meat done while not under cooking the thighs seemed like just the ticket.
I prepared the bird easily with an old Ho Ching Kee Lee cleaver I recently got off the bay. Easily done and the perfect tool for it. I put the bird in a shallow SS lasagna pan on a SS roasting grate that brought it 1.5 inches off the bottom. Inserted a Chef Alarm probe in the thickest part of the white meat. The bird weighed just over 7 lbs. (yeah, very large whole chickens in this neck of the woods). Due to the size, I decided to roast at 400F instead of the usual 425 - 450 I see in the numerous recipes I checked out.
The white meat registered 151F after 1 hour and 20 minutes. I pulled it and set it on my work table on a cooling rack. After 15 minutes, the temperature had gone up to 159F.
So how was it? Well, perhaps my thread title is a bit of hyperbole, but relative to how my birds usually come out, that how it seemed to me.
The skin on the tops of the breast meat were very over-browned (to me), while a lot on the rest were actually not quite browned enough, especially on the sides. The white meat was not any juicier or tender compared to my whole roasted chicken. In fact, maybe just a touch dryer. The legs were just a tad over done, noticeable mostly on the drumsticks. Very disappointing. Yet when I took the rest of the chicken apart after dinner to prepare my stock and store the meat, I found that the joints on the drumstick/thigh did not separate nearly as easily as they should have. This was even more so when separating the wings from the breast.
So, not really an epic fail, but a distinct disappointment.
For reference: My method for oven roasting a chicken is to place it breast side down in a large roasting pan with the typical V rack that can hold a small to medium turkey. I will roast this between 1.5 and 2.0 hours at 275F, then flip it over until the white meat hits 160. This works pretty darn well for juicy white meat and tender dark meat. The downside is the lack of any good crispy skin on the top of the bird. In all this recent research on the spatchco*ck method, I discovered that white meat should reach 150F and dark meat 170F. I felt silly knowing I was still unknowingly clinging to Betty Crocker style cooking. Yikes. Anyway, I see why my method works pretty well. If I use my own method again, I would increase the time with the breast side down and pull the bird when the temp reads 150 on the white meat.
Obviously the spatchco*ck method is viable, so I need to find out what I did wrong.
Oh, right....electric oven with the typical bottom heating element, and the bird sat right about in the center.
Hoping that some of you that use this method have some thoughts and suggestions.
