Branching out

It's still my plan to blog mainly about chicken, but I'll throw this link in just to keep it interesting.

GOYO'S KITCHEN TIPS # 1

Baked/roasted chicken is my favorite way to feed a lot of people with minimum labor and expense. We had ten at the table last night and I served three birds in three styles -- plain jane, spicy rub, BBQ -- along with rice, black beans and corn.

One of the problems I've found with serving multiple roast chickens is in the carving. It's best done at the table with the birds straight out of the oven; the wonderful contrast between crispy skin and juicy meat is the whole point of roasting a chicken and it's lost if you let the bird "rest" or pile the cut portions in a serving dish.

For me, trying to wrestle the meat off the steaming hot carcass while diners are naming their preferences is a frustrating, messy display at best and portioning before baking results in a much less succulent finished product. The solution to my dilemma is to butterfly the bird, roast it flat and then just section the carcass into portions at the table rather than carve. The pieces go straight on a platter large enough to accommodate them all without stacking and while that goes around the table I attack the next one and so down the line.

While this method encumbers the diners' plates with bone and gristle that carving would remove, it also retains all the juices that make perfectly roasted chicken such a delight. More importantly, it reduces the oven-to-plate time to the bare minimum and all of my consumer feedback indicates that the tradeoff is well worth it.

(To Be Continued)

Here's one for DB that I've been meaning to send for a while. Later tonite I'll try to figure out how all this crap actually works. I went online earlier just to check stuff out and ended up creating the blog before I knew what happened.

More later. (heh heh)

By way of experiment.