Heston’s favourite meal of the week is Sunday dinner. Here’s his recipe for the Perfect Roast Chicken. It’s about as far from perfect as it’s possible to get.
In our first review of Dinner by Heston at the Mandarin Oriental we described the food there as 21st Century Sunday lunches. And looking at much of his other output, from slow-roast pork belly to leg of lamb with anchovy, rosemary and garlic, it’s clear that Sunday lunch recipes are where Heston really shines.
Considering Heston describes his favourite Sunday lunch dish as roast chicken, AND considering this dish was the focus of a full half hour BBC show, you’d expect the 3-Michelin star chef’s version of the Perfect Sunday Roast Chicken recipe to be utterly flawless. You’d be dead wrong.
Heston’s Perfect Roast Chicken recipe is the second of Heston’s Perfection recipes that we’re testing out. And, unlike the stunning Heston Perfect Spaghetti Bolognese recipe, this couldn’t have been more disappointing.
This was another dish made for the 10pm Supper Club. For dessert we picked the ultimate Sunday classic: Apple Crumble. In this instance Heston’s Apple & Sultana Crumble recipe.
SUMMARY
Recipes: Heston’s Perfect Roast Chicken recipe
Special Equipment: Baster with needle attachment, digital probe thermometer, chicken-sized bowl
Special Ingredients: None
Time: 2 days
Cost: £12
Serves: 3 – 4
Difficulty: Medium
There have been a few changes to Heston’s Perfect Roast Chicken recipe since the publication of the first In Search Of Perfection book in 2006. The roast chicken recipe in Heston at Home differs quite significantly. However, it’s Heston’s 2006 Perfection recipe we’re testing out here.
Good portions of the show and book are dedicated to finding the perfect roasting bird. For Heston that’s the Poulet de Bresse, with Label Anglais coming a close second. Both of these birds are quite difficult to source, so we’re simply using the best quality supermarket chicken we can get our hands on.
REPORT
Step 1: Brining the Chicken
When does Heston want us to start his Sunday lunch? Saturday morning!
You have to make an 8% salt solution. The maths behind this baffled me at first, but basically just measure out your water and then add 8g of salt for every 100ml / 100g of water. We needed 2 litres of water, so 160g of salt.
You’ll also need a bowl or plastic box. One big enough to accept a full chicken and still fit inside your fridge. Our largest mixing bowl just about did the job. If you are brining your chicken then check first that whichever vessel you plan to use will definitely accommodate both bird and brine. If things look bleak you can always use the salad drawer.
The bird now needs to be left alone for 6 hours, after which we’ll be doing some very peculiar things to it. Be sure to remove the wings and wishbone first.
Step 2: Rinsing
Having used salt to help the bird’s flesh hold on to more moisture the aim now is to get excess salt out. Immerse the bird in as much clean water as you can and change this water frequently.
Heston’s instructions advise 4 changes of water (every 15 minutes) over an hour. We’ve tried this recipe before and still found this leaves the meat too salty. We say aim for 90 minutes to 2 hours of rinsing, changing the water every 10 minutes if possible.
Step 3: Blanching and Icing the Bird
Now this is very weird. There’s no precise information as to why you have to do this next bit in Heston’s Perfect Roast Chicken recipe, but our best guess would be “food hygiene”.
The entire bird is going to be “roasted” at a very mild 60 degrees centigrade. This is the borderline temperature for killing bacteria (15 minutes at 60° is sufficient to kill all pathogens). We’d guess this step sterilises the bird, removing any nasty bugs. The plunge into ice water then cools the bird down, preventing it from beginning to cook. That’s the theory, in practice it doesn’t work quite so well.
Not only does boiling a chicken for 20 seconds, then plunging it into iced water, look ridiculous, it’s also an incredibly awkward thing to do. Our bird was about 1.5kg – an awful lot of weight to hold on the end of a pair of kitchen tongs. Your chicken will probably slip off the tongs a couple of times and end up in the boiling water much longer than is good for it, while you struggle to fish it out with the aid of a spatula.
We blanched our bird three times rather than just 2, to be extra certain all the nasties were killed off. Don’t forget to tip water out of the cavity to aid cooling. Even so the bird ended up with some unsightly cooked spots. Also, since brining makes the skin quite fragile the tongs will put rips in it.
After this the bird is placed in the fridge overnight -with a jay cloth across its back. This is to help dry the skin, which ought to help it crisp up during the final stage of cooking on Sunday. Hope you enjoyed your rock n’ roll Saturday evening!
Step 4: Low Temperature Chicken
What time do you like to sit down to Sunday lunch? About 1pm? If so you’ll need to get started at 6am Sunday to get this to the table on time. That’s because Heston’s Perfect Roast Chicken recipe states that in a 60° oven the bird should take 4 – 6 hours to reach 60° itself. Oh, and this temperature needs to be held for 15 minutes to ensure food safety. So that 2 hour uncertainty seems a bit of a wide margin for you to plan an exact serving time.
Bad news for all you optimists: on the two occasions we’ve tried this recipe it has always taken the full 6 hours to get a reading of 60° from the thickest part of the breast. 7 hours on the first attempt.
And that’s if your oven can hold a steady 60°. Ours is analogue control and fan-only, meaning all sorts of temperatures in different parts of the oven. For our second attempt we ended up having to turn the oven up to 180° to get to the right internal temperature. We had 4 hungry people waiting to be served.
Don’t forget, there’s at least 40 minutes of extra “resting time” once the bird is out of the oven. 80 minutes in our case, as that’s how long the potatoes took.
Still, 6 hours gives you plenty time to get cracking on the spuds and the veg.
Step 5: Boiling the Potatoes
Peel your potatoes (specifically, Maris Piper potatoes) and reserve the skins. These skins should be tied up in muslin ready to be boiled with the potatoes.
Next you’re told to quarter the potatoes then rinse them under cold water for 5 minutes to remove surface starch. In practice we’ve found the water runs clear after just a couple of minutes.
Salt is as much an ingredient in Heston’s Sunday lunch Roast Chicken recipe as anything else, especially in the case of the potatoes. In the In Search of Perfection Roast Chicken episode Heston dedicates a few minutes to testing whether salted or unsalted water gives the best results. Salting wins, so get your scales out again and add 10g of salt for every litre of water you use in the pan.
Muslin is expensive but makes removing the potato skins after cooking loads easier. Those skins, as Heston discovers in the show, contain a lot of the potato’s flavour. This method means some of that flavour will infuse into spuds.
The boiling itself is the part that demands the most attention. Heston’s Perfect Chicken recipe (or Heston’s Perfect Roast Potato recipe, in this case) says that once the potatoes come to a boil 20 minutes of gentle simmering will be enough to get the spuds to the right level.
Our experience with wildly varied supermarket potatoes is that anywhere between 15 and 40 minutes is required. We’d suggest having a colander and slotted spoon handy. Fish each potato out of the pan when it looks ready – i.e. on the verge of falling to pieces.
Taking the potatoes to the brink of disintegration takes a fair bit of nerve. As you can see we bottled it on this occasion. At least we were able to rough the surface of the potatoes up by tossing them in the colander. For best results the potatoes should be allowed to cool completely before roasting, another 20 minutes or so.
Factoring in all these elements you should allow at least an hour before even thinking about going near a roasting tray.
Step 6: Roasting the Potatoes
We only have the one oven, so this step had to wait until the full 6-and-a-bit hours of chicken roasting had been completed.
Your boiled and roughed up potatoes are put into a roasting tin filled with olive oil. You want them to be quite well submerged, once all the potatoes are in it should be about a centimetre deep. Note: the tray full of oil needs to go in about 5 minutes before the potatoes do, you want very hot oil.
After that just turn them every 20 minutes, and 20 minutes before they come out add rosemary sprigs and a few bashed garlic cloves. This may depend on how your oven performs, but we found this step took about 80 minutes.
Step 7: Carrots
In his Perfect Roast Chicken recipe Heston is very specific about how the carrots should be cut. So: peeled, quartered lengthways then cut on the diagonal.
They are then cooked very gently in a pan for around an hour in a lot of butter with a dash of water. The pan needs to be large enough to cook all the carrots in a single layer. Your largest casserole should do the job (we held back the frying pan for the chicken skin stage). Turn them once or twice to ensure even cooking.
This is quite easy to do while the potatoes are roasting in a not-too-frantic final hour.
Step 8: Broccoli
Broccoli is a two-stage process. First, boil the broccoli for 3 minutes, before draining and plunging into iced water to col them down and halt the cooking process.
Just before serving time the broccoli gets seasoned then reheated in a pan of melted butter.
Step 9: Crispy Skin
While steps 6 to 8 were going on your chicken will have been resting under some loose foil. As you can see here the juices do not run “clear”. This caused a bit of worry amongst the assembled (impatient) diners.
I you’ve followed the recipe correctly the chicken skin will look very limp and flaccid at this point. And, above all, still raw. Heston’s “perfect” roast chicken needs crispy skin, and in this recipe that means pan frying an entire bird.
The astute ones amongst you will already have spotted that whole roast chicken is an irregular-shaped thing of many nooks and crannies. Not a smooth uniform shape that you could easily and evenly fry in a pan (although in the show Heston’s Poulet de Bresse is closer to this). We’ve also discussed how handling 1.5kg of chicken on the end of a pair of tongs is not the easiest proposition.
This part of Heston’s Perfect roast chicken recipe can best be described as “awkward and unsuccessful”. Plus, subjecting your chicken to the ferocious temperature of a frying pan seems to defeat the object of the previous 7 hours where we tried desperately to keep the meat from going anywhere north of 60°.
You’ll probably find, like we did, that the parts easiest to crisp in the frying pan are the sides of the thighs and the breasts. Oh, and the underside of the chicken that few people eat and that nobody even sees. The rest of the skin will remain stubbornly pallid.
The amount of splatter that this process creates is nothing short of spectacular – burst of hot oil exploding across the stovetop like miniature fireworks. So, awkward and unsuccessful and messy.
Step 10: Chicken-Infused Butter
Ah, butter. Where would any Heston Blumenthal recipe be without it.
In Heston’s Perfect Roast Chicken recipe there’s no gravy, his argument being that the bird will be “so succulent and moist you won’t need it”. Presumably that’s because in its place we have loads of melted butter oozing out of the bird. That’s after we’ve injected it into the chicken.
Chicken-infused butter, to be exact. To make this simply dump the chopped chicken wings (and wishbone, if you removed that too) into a pan full of butter and heat until the butter stops sizzling.
Then you’ll need one of these disturbing looking contraptions. A baster with needle attachment. Forget the ones you find on the supermarket shelf for under a fiver. To get one with a needle, which you absolutely need here, will set you back about £9 on Amazon.
The (frighteningly hot) chicken butter now needs to be injected at as many points around the bird as you can manage, until liquid butter is literally oozing out of every pore. We’d made the full amount specified by the recipe but used less than half of it.
Now, with roast potatoes, carrots and broccoli all ready to serve, you can take your chicken to the dinner table and serve.
VERDICT
Heston’s “Perfect” Roast Chicken recipe has so many failings that it’d be easier to just list them all:
- At 60° the legs and thighs are undercooked – half the meat on the bird is inedible.
- Complete lack of gravy – this is such an essential part of our Sunday Lunch, yet it’s missing from this “perfect” recipe.
- Unevenly crispy skin – the shape of the bird means pan-frying only crisps a few small patches of skin, the rest is unpleasantly flabby due to the brining and low-temperature roasting.
- Pan-fry overcooking – where we could pan-fry the skin the bird was in the pan so long that we suspect the meat underneath became overcooked.
- No stuffing – as kids we always had Paxo with our Sunday roast chicken. We’d have expected a gourmet version of this. It’s as bad as having beef without Yorkshires.
Saying that the legs and thighs were undercooked isn’t just an exaggeration – there’s actually confirmation from the man himself that these parts of the bird need to be taken to 75°C in Heston’s Coq Au Vin recipe.
It’s no wonder that Heston’s Perfect Roast Chicken recipe has changed so much since this book / TV show. The carrots and the potatoes both work brilliantly, indeed these are the best roast spuds we’ve ever cooked and this is now our preferred method.
The broccoli less so. In Heston at Home there’s a chapter on side dishes and vegetables, in which Heston actually confirms that the flavour molecules in broccoli are fat-soluble. Put simply: the flavour compounds will leave the veg and go into the fat. From our point of view it’d be simpler and more effective to just boil or steam this veg for the best result.
Personal preferences mean gravy and stuffing are sorely missed. The absurd rigmarole of preparing the bird: brining, blanching, frying and injecting are all far too much hassle to ever bother repeating, especially when the results are so completely underwhelming.
There’s no denying the breasts of the chicken were wonderfully succulent and tender. If you’ve never tried brining or low-temperature cooking before then these will be a revelation. Otherwise every other aspect of the bird-cooking process is a complete failure.
On the plus side: Two down, only fourteen more to go. And our dessert, Heston’s Apple and Sultana Crumble recipe, was pretty good.
NEXT TIME
As fans of Nathan Mhyrvold’s Modernist Cuisine we’re quite taken with the idea of cooking a jointed bird as in their recipe for slow-baked chicken with onions.
We’d add thyme and lemon, but this recipe looks like it’d give just as good a result, but cut the cooking time in half. And injecting brine directly into the chicken portions would be a lot more practical. Provided you can forgo the tableside carving.
Alongside the caramelised onions the remaining bird carcass could be separately roasted underneath with the potatoes, then used as the basis for a decent, if conventional, gravy. Stuffing could be supplied by omitting the festive ingredients from Heston’s Cranberry and Caraway stuffing recipe.
Otherwise those of you looking to make a purely Heston Blumenthal Roast Chicken recipe would do well to look at the updated version of the recipe. It even includes gravy.
Further Reading
Click here for all 16 of Heston Blumenthal’s In Search of Perfection recipes
Do you think a traditional Sunday roast chicken recipe is worth this much effort, or do you have some handy tricks and tips to improve the standard recipe yourself? Have you tried making this recipe? Please tell us in the comments section.
Gosh, that’s a recipe with a LOT of failings… shame it wasn’t tested before inclusion in the 2006 book really.
I can totally see where they’re going with it, and when I first tried this recipe back in ’09 -having never experienced what brining and low-temperature cooking can achieve- it really was a revelation.
Plus, a lot of my dislikes (no gravy or stuffing) are pesonal perference. Which I reckon we’re all allowed if you think about Heston’s insistance on putting coffee beans in his “perfect” vanilla ice cream.
Nowadays this libertine just uses injection brining and sous-vide for convenience.
Your chicken looks MASSIVE! Perhaps that’s why it was undercooked?
Here’s how big a normal chicken should be: http://resources0.news.com.au/images/2013/03/22/1226599/814008-chicken.jpg
Hi Doobie.
We used a UK medium sized chicken which feeds four people modestly. If anything I’d want to go for a larger bird to ensure full stomachs and leftovers.
In future we’ll be roasting the bird at 80 after using a brining syringe. It saves the pain of rinsing, won’t waterlog the skin and is definitely worth it to reduce the overall cooking time.
I tried this recipe a while back, and it made a wonderful (if confusing) breakfast. I was aiming to have it ready around 9pm, but by the time it had actually cooked through, it was 7am!
Mine turned out beautifully though; I must say it was the most succulent and tasty chicken I’ve ever had 🙂
Afterwards I found myself wondering whether perhaps we’re supposed to start roasting the bird from room temperature; rather than refrigerated? I know leaving poultry at room temperature seems like a very bad idea – and it probably is, but if it were already at room temperature it wouldn’t take anywhere near as long to cook through at the low temperatures we’re using here…
Agree about the frying the chicken skin being a tricky (and painful) experience (pinced one finger purple in the tongs when they slipped; and really really regretted cooking in a t-shirt.
I don’t know how long it would take to deep fry the skin on the sucker…? Obviously it’s a challenge to prevent the bird from cooking through whilst it’s frying though.
I’m thinking refrigerated bird > deep fat fryer on highest for a few seconds, then continue the process by baking at the low temperature might be the way to go?
The roast potatoes were spectacular though; better than any I’ve cooked (or eaten) before – his recipe is the only way to roast potatoes now, as far as I’m concerned!
P.S. I believe the blanching is there to tighten up the skin, not for hygeine reasons.
Apologies for the slow reply, wanted to give your comment the time to make the proper, detailed reply it deserves.
I think the room temperature option couldn’t hurt. The bird is effectively sterile after he blanching, and holding at 60 degrees for 15 minutes should take care of any remainin pathogens. The overnight chill seems to be essential for dying the skin out though.
We did have this EXACT problem when doing our Christmas goose at low temperature: http://www.insearchofheston.com/2012/12/heston-blumenthals-christmas-dinner-recipes/
Deep frying sounds like the best strategy for perfectly even skin. We don’t have a fryer at the mo, a big one would be essential. Did you catch Tim Hayward’s deep frying of a whole turkey for Thanksgiving? It’s an excellent watch / read: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/video/2011/nov/23/how-to-deep-fry-turkey
Our next roast bird will probably be done using Heston’s modernised recipe: 80 degrees and just 2 – 3 hours in the oven. I really didn’t like the undercooked legs & thighs. Plus, to save time and hassle we’ll probably be following the MOdernist Cuisine approach with injection brining http://modernistcuisine.com/recipes/injection-brining/ (managed to get one of those needles off ebay for a tenner).
You’re absolutely right about the roast spuds! Look forward to hearing how your next roast turns out 🙂
I’ve tried this recipe a couple of times, and managed to reach quite a comfortable middle ground. The roast potatoes really are spectacular, and there’s nothing I’d change about them, except maybe adding goose fat instead of olive oil, but that’ll have to wait for next time.
With the bird itself, every time I’ve tried blanching and pan-frying the thing, it’s just a completely awkward mess. The purpose is, of course, to retain moisture through slow-cooking, but I don’t see why it isn’t just advised to make gravy instead, since with the gravy you can add even more flavours to improve the taste of the dish overall. As you say, most people prefer gravy and you don’t end up with an unsightly piece of chicken that guests are afraid (not unjustifiably) will give them salmonella poisoning. For a guy who’s extremely passionate about cooking being a multi-sensory experience, it surprises me that he thought it would be OK to advise pan-frying a whole chicken, given how weird the end result looks. I refuse to believe that the perfectly browned chicken on the show was made through this method – it’s just not possible to get all the skin in contact with the metal in the two minutes allotted cooking time. However, it’s worth noting that the pan-frying was actually a compromise and the best method they found was actually deep-frying the whole thing, so if you’ve got a deep fat fryer that can hold a whole chicken, that might be worth trying out.
I usually brine the chicken in the 8% salt solution, let the skin dry in the fridge overnight, then just cook it the traditional way – at roughly 160 degrees and then turn the heat up for the last five minutes to crisp the skin. It seems to work just as well and allow for the creation of that wonderful gravy we’re so passionate about!
I would add two things, though. The chicken-infused butter seems to me a bit of a pretentious, overkill addition to the whole process. Some people actually like the wings, and they’re discarded as a result of this step. Also, when I tried it the butter didn’t really ‘inject’ properly – just sort of sprayed everywhere when it wouldn’t go into the chicken. Wouldn’t try that bit again.
For the roast potatoes, since muslin is £2.50 a sheet here in the UK and the skins require you to use a whole one, the same result can be achieved by just dumping the skins in the pot that you parboil the potatoes in. It means more work tidying up, but at least you don’t waste money on the muslin.
I bought a massive roll of muslin off eBay for cheap, but even so the spud-net uses a disturbing amount of it. I took a leaf out of Auldo’s Big Fat Undertaking blog advice and now use sterile hair nets (eBay again) held on with a bulldog clip. I’m told the ends of a pair of old tights will do the trick too. These tips probably sound daft but muslin isn’t cheap and I don’t want to start resenting what Heston has done to my bank balance any more than I already do.
Hi Alex! Thanks for taking the time to respond with such a detailed answer. Apologies that its taken us so long to give you the reply you deserve.
You make some absolutely vital points.
The pan frying is a total waste of time. Pure slapstick. The injected butter isn’t much better. Most of ours just spurted back out of the bird.
This perfection recipe is a failure at every step. I’d love to try deep frying but after 4 years of filling the kitchen with siphons and sous vide racks I doubt I’d be allowed another appliance. And if anything it’ll be a Kenwood Food mixer for baking.
We’ve started using modernist cuisine injection brining. It saves time and space in the fridge, and the skin doesn’t hold on to water and end up flabby.
Would love to know what you think of the idea.
Hi Alex! You make some absolutely vital points.
The pan frying is a total waste of time. Pure slapstick. The injected butter isn’t much better. Most of ours just spurted back out of the bird.
This perfection recipe is a failure at every step. I’d love to try deep frying but after 4 years of filling the kitchen with siphons and sous vide racks I doubt I’d be allowed another appliance. And if anything it’ll be a Kenwood Food mixer for baking.
We’ve started using modernist cuisine injection brining. It saves time and space in the fridge, and the skin doesn’t hold on to water and end up flabby.
Would love to know what you think of the idea.
Frenchclick.co.uk sell poulet de bresse. Not bought one for a couple of years, but the service was excellent.
We fully intend to revisit this recipe very soon (I want to lay all the demons of book 1 to rest before we get started on the second one).
I’m not sure if our budget will stretch to a thirty-two quid bird sadly, but this is a magnificent reference to have. You know your stuff sir!
I don’t know how I’ve missed this post for 6 months. As you’ve mentioned I’ve cooked this chicken and other recipes since and I have combo I like: dry brining (heavily salting overnight in a fridge, with citrus and other aromatics such as rosemary), then the slow roast for 6 hours followed by a maximum temp blast for 10-15 mins.
Heston’s roast potato recipe is of course, not a patch on mine 😉
We really want to have another crack at the Perfection Roast Chicken recipe, or at least an adaptation of it that’d avoid all the ridiculous dunking uncertain finishing times.
I think we’d use a lot of your advice and techniques in our next attempt. We’ve been having a lot of success with a brine injector we got off eBay, it avoids the soaking and rinsing process and doesn’t waterlog the skin.
P.S. – we’ve of course made your roast potato recipe and it’s fantastic – a genuien rival to Heston’s, but shhhhhh, I don’t think we’re allowed to say that on here 😉
I’ve just been catching up with some Heston TV and I noticed there’s a much simpler recipe for the brined sunday roast chicken in “How to Cook Like Heston”. There’s no basting, no icing and he says cook it at 75°C if 60°C seems too low. It even uses a whole lemon and thyme, just like Gordon. It doesn’t mention changing the brining solution just keeping the whole thing in the fridge.
Seems this is definitely worth a revisit!
Hi Dan,
Thanks for reading – You’re absolutely right and it’s obvious you know your stuff!
The Perfection recipes are all good in theory, and they’re a wonderful (if often stressful) learning experience, but none of them are particularly practical.
We’d love to have another crack at the Heston Roast Chicken recipe, and something similar to the method you outline is exactly what we’d go for.
Hi Phil,
So I’ve had my crack at the brined roast chicken and it seems it was a success. I followed the “How to Cook Like Heston” method, brining it overnight in the 6% salt solution. Thanks to my wife’s Tupperware addiction we have a plastic bowl with lid for this.
I chose a very ordinary, supermarket-bought 1.2kg chook, figuring it wouldn’t take as long to cook. My oven varied between 90°C and 100°C according to my after-market oven thermometer. Taking the temperature after 2.5 hours it was 50°C and after 3.5 hours it was 65°C deep in the breast.
I pulled it out at this stage and let it sit for 30 minutes. It was 35°C in our kitchen (hot day in Sydney today) so I figured it wasn’t going to cool much anyway. I then blasted it for 15 minutes at 240°C. When I pulled it out, I could see the juices under the crispy skin boiling, so I figured that was a good sign.
Slicing it up as it cooled, the taste was fantastic, with plenty of thyme and slight lemon taste throughout. My parents who were visiting also tried it and declared it very, very good. I was a little apprehensive of the 65°C internal temp but once it was all sliced up, there was no problem. The meat was white, soft, very juicy and properly cooked. A couple of bloody bits near bone joints only. I think I might have pushed the probe in too far and it was measuring the temperature in the cavity, not the flesh.
So it’s all very sound, and tastes great but as for a Sunday lunch idea I think it would work. If you put it on early enough you can just let it sit until your guests are ready, then blast it in the over 20 minutes before you serve. I’ll definitely be trying this again. I think it’s the first Heston recipe I’ve tried that’s worked first time.
Cheers!
We had similar issues when roasting the chicken at such a low temperature – we now try to brine the chicken and then just roast it as normal – the brine helps with the tenderness. In fact, I just want to brine everything I eat now.
[…] epic In search of heston found the very first version of this chicken a tad disappointing. A recent retry with a syringe offered better results Crystal […]
[…] Bei den üblichen Verdächtigen bin ich auch noch fündig geworden. Heston Blumenthal hat einige unterschiedliche Versionen des Rezeptes vorgestellt: Zu nächst pökelt er das Hähnchen bevor er es zweimal für 30 Sekunden ins kochenden Wasser und ins Eiswasser gibt, es danach im Kühlschrank trocknen lasst, es dann in niedriger Temperatur lange im Ofen lässt und dann unterscheiden sich die Rezepte je nach Quelle: Entweder raus aus dem Ofen und anbraten oder raus aus dem Ofen abkühlen und dann im Ofen grillen. Die Kritiken der unterschiedlichen Blogger sind – sagen wir es diplomatisch – durchwachsen (bspw. hier). […]
Hi Phil, thanks for a good article. I was just watching “Cooking according to Heston” on swedish TV in which he devotes an entire episode to chicken. By reading your description on how you prepared the chicken and cooked it there was two discrepancies compared to the tv show, which may have an impact on your poor results: Heston used
1) 60 g of salt per litre, not your 80 g / litre of water
2) When undercooking, he had a temperature of 90 degrees C for 1,5 hours (obviously depending on the size of the chicken) stuffing it with thyme and a melon.
As the signature Dan describes his attempt, I think he succesfully grasped (Hestons version 1.4 ) chicken recipe, but as you wrote Phi this recipe is not for the time optimists (which I am)l, I won´t try this recipe for lunch but rather for dinner.
Again thanks for the vivid description of your test runs, i was good reading.
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Totally agree, could only eat the breast. Also agree, browning the skin didn’t work…and i must say, i didn’t actually like the texture of the skin at all.
Have had hugely successful results spatchcocking (see The Food Lab) and also sometimes sous-vide coking the breast crown whilst roasting legs as normal.
This recipe was quote possibly the worst i have ever folloerf
[…] epic In search of heston found the very first version of this chicken a tad disappointing. A recent retry with a syringe offered better results Crystal […]
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