CHICKEN CAGE MATCH: Julia Child vs. Thomas Keller vs. Marcella Hazan 

LOL!!

Pepin is a master at chicken. But I want to raise you Zuni Cafe's chicken recipe. It's the best I've ever had.

👏 👏 👏 Good point!

@@pnourani That is true! 🤔 I may have to make my own match.

If he put Justin Wilson up against them he’d win “I guarantee.”

@@CAP198462 🤔 I will have to check that out!

Agreed, but also the chickens back then were quite different from the super-quick growing breeds of today.

Also, she felt obliged to represent French tradition in "Mastering" -- indeed her writing partner Simone Beck insisted on it. I would guess that in later books like "The Way To Cook" she had evolved a recipe that was less fussy without sacrificing on the result.

Rotating the chicken while it roasts allows the juices in the chicken to distribute throughout the meat, especially in the breast

​@@urbangardener66literally incorrect factually and semantically. Rotating the meat does none of that, which semantically is the same as turning, FLIPPING would have some kind of effect. Rotating is only to make sure even cooking for hot spots is achieved. Flipping serves the same purpose as rotating, by obviously cooking the other side of the meat, but also the same function as basting by allowing the rendered fat that has coated the bottom of the meat to now run down the other side of the meat. That's why you usually cook something with a fat cap with the fat cap side up so that the meat can "self baste" since the fat will render out and run down the meat using gravity. It does not go back inside the meat and through it during rendering. Though basting, whether mechanically or by the food, is not always something you want though some find desirable since it will darken the skin since it allows the thermo conduction from the oil the constant rendering or basting of fat (since it's a liquid) helps cool down the meat and makes it take longer to cook. It's a trade off. Redistrubiting juices within the meat has nothing to do with either as that does not happen until after you finish cooking. Meat will continue to render out fat regardless of which way it's turned or flipped. Once you finish cooking meat and allow it to rest, then "the juices redistribute inside". You can test this for yourself easily by immediately cutting into a fresh of out the oven, off the grill, etc piece of meat and watching how much juices flow out of it. And doing exactly the same, but letting the meat rest for 5-10 minutes first. Liquid, be it water from evaporation or fat from rendering, are constantly being expressed out of meat as you cook it. Just turning it around doesn't somehow make the fluids go back INSIDE or into other parts of the meat.

@@Mr_Jumbles you can write as long as response as you want, all I know is that I've been rotating my birds a quarter turn while they roast for almost 50 years now and the juices redistribute through the bird as it cooks. Much like a rotisserie chicken...wow what a concept.

😂😂😂

Now, I take a few and boil them in a coffee cup and just add the liquid.

Bowl You and call you Jamie!! ❤

I have a KitchenAid in the same silver as Jamie and now when I pull it out I do a jump and go “Silver Fox!” like Jamie does 😂

@@arianamauery9281 Mine is dark blue, so I guess I have to call it “Blue Devil”.

He should have done 4!

You said “simple” and “Julia” in the same sentence. Fail.

It’s similar to Marcella’s.

@@PootWindbreaker Kindred

Simpler even as Marcella`s Chicken?

Good points!

I’ve done the lemon thing before, but I put more herbs onto the outside of the chicken. I only use one lemon though. The place this technique shines is if you roast Cornish Hens. They tend to be a bit dry, so having a quarter of a lemon in the cavity works really well.

I recommend you try out dry brining - and also spatchcocking. You're gonna get next level chicken. Kenji Lopez-Alt is your man.

We now spatchcock and wet brine our turkey for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. Delicious, moist meat, crispy skin, carcass is ready for soup while the neck contributes to the gravy for the meal. Roasting time doesn't take all dang afternoon.@@JohannesWiberg

The thing is with bay leaves, they have to be fresh. I pluck them straight from my bay tree in the garden. Crush them slightly before using, They exude the sweetest/savory aroma unlike any other herb and add a subtle piquancy to many dishes. Those dried-up specimens that come in a supermarket jar will, I agree, add very little to a recipe. I'd recommend planting a little bay shrub in a pot. They look pretty and can be easily pruned into a ball shape if you want to make a feature of it.

@@twigletz7384 It depends where you buy your dry herbs. I buy mine at an Arabic store. The dried herbs last very long.

I use bay leaves in almost all savory dishes. Taco meat, chili beans, soups, they add a wonderful flavor that doesn't shout bay leaf. In the lemon chicken I would put 2 bay leaves and 2 garlic cloves in the cavity with the lemons.

Yeah but you're playing fast and loose with salmonella. Even the great Martha Stewart stopped wet brining irds after she and her crew got very sick from a Thanksgiving episode.

Two details here have me doubting M. Stewart's mishap' was anything but a cross-contamination accident (ie. Infecting the bird after cooking, with soiled tools or surfaces) : a) if only for it's salt content, and providing a certain time, brining is already potently disinfectant. b) so is oven-cooking, also providing sufficient time, obviously. As for Keller's brine, twelve bay leaves, brought to the boil, make a fantastic antiseptic, plus the salt, pepper-corns, and cooking time, again...

My dad has been brining our Thanksgiving turkey for years and it is amazing every year.

​@@lillyess385yeah, I don't think that had anything to do with a wet brine. Sorry... I've had wet brined turkey every year of my life for Thanksgiving. And most of the ones from growing up in the 80s & early 90s were questionably brined in the sink overnight. Nobody ever got salmonella. Yeah, I know that's anecdotal evidence, but so is one story about Martha Stewart. 😒

​@@goldilox369it is more about how chicken and turkeys are raised in the US. We have recipes with brined poultry in Europe too, yet salmonella is less of a problem. It s the same with the eggs, salmonella is a very american issue. Because of the raising conditions. (Germany was a noticeable exception in Europe before some regulations changed, with far more cases than the rest of Eu, but also far more than in the US)

Agree. Plus, ovens back then heated unevenly (and there was no convection) so to get a perfectly browned chicken all over, you would have no choice but to turn and baste often.

I was going to say so, and they also contribute their sugars and distinct aromas to the drippings, which were used as a base for the gravy, which was out of boundaries in the scoring, remember? A little unfair, I find. Unfortunately, J. C.'s forte were not in the sauces, or she' d known better than overpower those dish-glazes with beef stock, rather than chicken, plus a 1/4 cup dry vermouth or sherry or marsala for a start...?!

@@marie-suzankalogeropoulos9249JC definitely evolved on that topic, I have both Mastering and The Way to Cook from 1989. TWTC has much simpler recipes and her pan sauces are exactly as you described.

Mu mum used to put some apples, that works pretty well too. Specially that you can eat the roasted apples with the chicken.

​@@Nixx0912 I never thought of apples. That sounds delicious. I'm going to try it. 😃👍

I do it with my T-day turkey too, it just adds a little brightness to the meat.

Try unpeeled whole garlic cloves, too.

let us know how it turns out! it sounds amazing.

That sounds so good... yum!

I would go with simpler brine (water, salt, sugar), butter under the skin, and lemons in cavity. Tuck wings under, and truss the legs.

@@fordhouse8bThe perfect hybrid recipe.

That's what I said! Of course, I was born in New Orleans, where our motto is, "Too much is never enough!" Ha-ha!

​@@fordhouse8b did you try it?

While I don't use a wheelchair, I've worked in group homes and various other settings that included helping people who use wheelchairs, since I was 17. So 30+ years experience with a lot of different people using wheelchairs in different ways. Anyone using a wheelchair long-term will know more than I do about what works for them, but few people have the range of observation of comparing what works for different people in different situations. If possible you want a countertop oven where the door opens to the side, not forward. You want to avoid having to reach over the hot oven door, so your hands or arms don't accidentally brush on it and get burned. Unlike the door to an oven in your stove, with the hinge low to the ground, an oven on the counter will have a hot door at counter height, where your arms will be while reaching into it. And a standard height counter would make this more likely, if your wheelchair doesn't either stand you up or raise you, seated, to eye level, as you're really sitting too low to reach over the door. (Your height will affect this, especially the height of your shoulders in comparison to the height of the counter.) Or else put the oven on a counter that has been lowered, or a table that has been lowered to set the oven at a safe height to reach into. (And yes, I know that wheelchairs that hold you up to stand or raise to eye level are hard to get covered by insurance, and crazy expensive to buy yourself.) Location will matter a lot, as well. You need to be able to get a heavy, hot item from the oven to a counter with a heatproof mat, or someplace else where you can put it down safely, without having to rest it on your lap to free your hands to move your wheelchair. I've seen people manage moving hot containers of food in a variety of ways when using either a manual or power wheelchair, and it's rarely what I'd consider safe in comparison to being able to hold the pan while walking. A door that opens sideways, and enough space on the counter in front of it that you can pull a dish out of the oven and rest it on the counter without moving further, is ideal. Jamie or someone with experience with the oven would need to comment on if it heats fast enough that you could leave the door open to prep the food in front of it, slide the dish into the cold oven, and then set it to heat. And also how long you can leave the door of the oven open if you preheat it, and still have it count as preheated.

In a french cooking julia child style i expect more something like bouchees à la reine to deal with chicken leftovers. Great to have him make some 1000 fold puffpastry to then build the vol-au-vent.

I've never heard of those dishes but would love to see him try. @@etienne8110

I brine for convenience when using frozen birds. It feels safer to thaw them this way.

I remember Cook's Illustrated comparing ways to roast salmon, and they compared using nothing, sugar solution, or honey solution on the surface, and the honey solution browned far deeper and more evenly than plain sugar. I can't, offhand, remember why. But the honey in the brine is going to make a difference beyond just the the sugars. It feels as if there is a lot of flavor and potential left in that brine after using it on just one chicken. I wonder if it would be possible to fill the pot with something like bone-in, skin-on chicken leg quarters, brine in the leftover concoction in the fridge overnight, then freeze the chicken legs in one-meal portions (one leg quarter per person in the household) to be thawed and roasted at high heat later. Using such a heavy pan for roasting (enameled cast iron) and pre-heating it is going to save a lot of cooking time, as the heat held in the pan will counter the inevitable drop in the air temperature of a pre-heated oven when it is opened to put the food in the oven. I doubt you'd get the same effect from a lightweight roasting pan, such as a disposable foil one.

ThatDudeCanCook makes a very similar brine and says it’s good for one more use.@@uleubner

You could probably do it with orange as well. This may get past your family’s dislike of lemon

@@davidlist684 Oh! Good idea. They aren't much of a citrus person, but I think orange wouldn't taste nearly so strong. Thanks!

try one lime. It's wonderful on chicken fajitas or tacos.

Do it anyway, they can have a grilled cheese or something on that day and they'll live 🙂

When I bought rotisserie chickens in France, the cavity would often be filled with cloves of garlic, about two whole heads of garlic worth per chicken ;-) That tasted lovely.

You've hit it, spot on! I use it so much as a basic for ALL my Mediterranean cooking, I know something 's missing when I forget it. But in fact, THE best way to tell what it adds, is using it in some of the blander recipes, so as to trace the major contrast, and what it brings to the more delicate balances... The English use an onion and bay leaf white sauce as a trimming for traditional Christmas Guinea fowl, as well as butter fried bread crumbs and the bird 's own roasting gravy.

Nothing like experience to pass on a lesson, though. And brining cutting the cooking time down is something I didn't know about wet brining. And the finish because of the addition of the honey. I'm glad Jamie did it. Now, what he has to try is dry brining. It won't get TK's colour, but the flavours he uses would influence the flavour.

Quite frankly they were different in the 80s. And I'm just... well... 42. The skin was different. Crisper, without the meat drying out. Or maybe my late gran was a chicken genius, who knows. That Thomas Keller is going to be tried next week though. No rotisserie chicken from the Belgian market then.

@@TheShrike616 Nah, you're correct. The Cornish Cross (our modern grocery store chicken) hadn't overtaken the grocery store market, and there was generally more variety. Most modern chickens are bred for size, rather than flavor (which is part of why chicken is so inexpensive per pound).

Weren't the birds more gamey and tougher?

@@lillyess385No

So true! Chicken doesn't even taste like chicken unless you buy it from a farmer. It is impossible to get those huge chickens to taste right. Hard to get parts cooked enough without not being bloodly.

Me too. I only watch ads of my favorites 🤷🏻‍♀️

Also, delighted you are on the chicken challenge. It’s the holy grail.

It was a bit bland. Lemon and Rosemary. Or a Clove-studded lemon. Hmm!

I was thinking the same. Brine a chicken, stuff it with lemon, cook on high, baste with butter, and make the sauce.

Yes! Please more of them.

Rotating the chicken was probably important in a time with no convection oven ^^

And opening / closing oven to baste and turn the bird?! No wonder it will take an eon - sorry Jules...

It is actually the best even with convection. Ensures the whole chicken is well roasted and has a nice crisp. Also we use potatoes rather than carrots, they soak the juices better. Typical french chicken recipe would be poulet à l estragon (creamy fench chicken tarragon)

@@etienne8110 I'm french, and in my family we often eat roasted chicken, I've never heard of rotating the bird, or creamy tarragon chicken ^^ All we do is baste the chicken every twenty minutes or so with a glass of hot water.

@@krankarvolund7771 le poulet à l estragon est un plat typique notamment de la region Aquitaine, mais c est surtout devenu un classique de brasserie dans les années 50. Tapez poulet à l estragon sur gogol et vous verrez que est juste votre famille qui etait une exception mal informée. Le reste de la France connaissait. ^^

Oh, never thought of that. Again, been doing these things for years! Thanks