Practice Makes Perfect

I happened to be on the phone with one of my multitude of fans (In the de-I universe anything number greater than 20 is a multitude!) when I was chastised unmercifully for not having posted anything to my blog IN AGES. Evidently he was going through some kind of withdrawal. I mean on the one hand, I have to say that I'm pretty damn pleased that my attempts at writing can cause at least one case of addiction. But on the other hand, it hasn't even been a week yet since the last post.

Well never let it be said that I am not sensitive to my audience. In fact I have had a couple of posts in my head but had let the work of finishing my third book get in the way. Shame on you de-I!

Let's talk about chicken...roast chicken in specific (I include roasting turkey in this same subject). Ever since we built the Crystal Palace and redid our kitchen, I have struggled to produce a reasonable roast bird. This mostly related to the proclivity of my new oven to cook hotter than my prior oven and the changing of my technique to a brining then hot oven cooking technique.

Over many repetitions I was consistently burning the top of the bird long before the bird was actually cooked. Gradually I started to make adjustments. And that the holy maker, I actually kept notes of what I was doing! So gradually, I adjusted the amounts in the brine, the time it was in the brine, the rack height in the oven, the temperature of the oven, the setting of the oven roast (both top and bottom elements on) or bake (only bottom element on) or some combination, the actual cooking time, etc.

This Sunday I am happy to say that while I did not achieve roast bird perfection, we got the best result I had in a long time.

These were mighty fine tasting birds, let me tell you. Still need a bit of tweaking between the amount of time in the bake mode versus the roast mode to get the skin to perfection.