Roast Chicken Redux

Updated and improved version of roast chicken. Recording this.

Chicken Thighs have improved - juicy and tasty with a not too tender texture.

Breasts very slightly drier because of the slightly higher ending temp than last time - not a breast man, but mw is.

Skin is delicious and crisp, though not shatteringly so.

For further improvement, I'd try kampong chicken to see if the less fat chicken affects taste. The skin is much better now, but I suspect hard to improve because of the wet brine. I'd keep the wet brine, as opposed to injection, coz I like the coca cola brine.

Recipe for repeatability.
1. Brine chicken 10 hours in 5% brine solution composed of 0.5 litre water with 100g salt and 1.5 litre of classic coca cola.

2. Take out chicken, dry it out with paper towels as much as possible. Refrigerate for several hours or overnight to dry the skin out further.

3. Carefully use fingers to separate skin from meat starting at the breast without breaking the skin.

4. Insert longish rosemary twigs under the skin. The purpose being to keep the skin away from the meat as much as possible. During the slow roast, this bit of skin will turn translucent and during the high heat phase, will be paper crisp.

5. Stuff cavity with orange or lemon. Tie or sew up any exposed flesh as much as possible.

6. Roast in oven at 90C for about 1.5 hours until temp of flesh near skin is about 50-55C. Then turn the heat down to 77C and roast for about 2.5 hours. The idea being to bring the meat temp up as quickly as possible while still at low temp roast. Then at 50-55C, you want to really slow roast it.

7. Once the chicken temp hits about 64-65C or so (the 2.5 hours in step 6), turn the heat to 69-70C. You want the chicken meat to slow roast in the region of 66-69C for 1 to 1.5 hours. Even with the heat equalised during the slow roast, you still need a bit of temperature gradient.

8. Take out chicken and rest a bit. If this was all done right, there will be very little dripping because the moisture has been retained in the chicken.

9. Turn oven temp as hot as it will go. Mine goes to 275C convection.

10. Pop chicken in for about 4 mins or so. Watch it very carefully to avoid burning.

11. Take out chicken. It may be unevenly browned. Complete the browning with a blow torch.