French Roasted Chicken with a Fresh Herb Crust

ChefLive Chef John McDermott French Roasted Chicken with a Fresh Herb Crust We’ll make a whole roast chicken and I’m going to serve it on the side. On the side of the chicken we’re going to serve is a salad of side of mesculin greens with the champagne vinegar. We’re going to truss the chicken. I’m going to get a clean cut. I’m going to get a little broth for my chicken because you know we don’t want any cross contamination. So now the first step, now this chicken I washed it already. My grandmother used to just soak the chicken. She used to soak in almost brine or with salt-water. I wouldn’t call it a brine but she would let the chicken sit in salt water probably for a couple of hours and that extracts the impurities, the blood out of the chicken. And once you take it from the pot you would—the cabinet in my grandmother’s kitchen had the handles and there’s always a chicken hanging from string from these. You walk in the kitchen and there was a chicken hanging in there all the time. That’s what we do. It’s always my grandmother’s menu. You walk in a “okay we’re having chicken hanging”. So, this is a butcher twine here, if you go to a good supermarket that has a good butcher department they’ve got butcher twine available. So, the first step, the reason that we truss because we want the chicken to cook evenly all the way throughout. So, when we tied up, if you look at the chicken right now it’s kind of loose. What we do is I’m going to take the twine, first I’m going to take the gizzards out. We’ll put this over here on the side. And sometimes I like to just a turn a little bit of this fellow usually we have a piece of fire right here. I’m going to turn this off and we start trussing the chicken so I’m going to put the string. The string goes behind both legs like this and we’re going to cross them. So I came from behind. I’m going to cross the string so that I wrap up each leg. We’ll pull them together and the string is going to come behind the chicken. It will come up on both sides of the neck, around the wings and then on the chicken’s back and we simply tie a knot. Let’s throw my excess string. Now, the next step, you can see the chicken now it’s more of a ball. It’s all together. It could make it easier to — when we roast it’s going to cook a little bit more evenly. Now, I’m taking two egg yolks in this small dish here and the pastry brush. I’m going to brush the egg yolk onto the chicken all over the skin. This recipe is a little bit different. While the yolk is going to - it will give the herbs something to stick to. So, we’ll get that all brush down now with egg yolks. The next step, taking some herbs here, they are varied. I’ve chopped them already. This is a mix of tarragon and sorrel. There are more sorrel than anything else here along side. There is more parsley than anything else. We’re going to add parsley and sorrel and some tarragon. And we’re going to take these fresh chopped herbs and we’re going to put around right over the chicken like soak. You see it sticking to the yolks. We give it a pat just to kind of help out a little bit. There are nice cool herbs on them. I’m going to season with about fringes of salt one more time and for some fresh black pepper. Now, I got my oven pre-set 425 degrees. Now, I’m going to take just a little bit of this olive oil here into the bottom. I’m going to roast this pan here. I like skillets just a touch of oil in the bottom and we’ll rub that out like this. Now, my chicken is going to go right in the pan like this. Let’s wait for the oven. Now, we’re going to place it in a 426 degree oven. It’s been pre-set. And at 425 degrees I’m going to allow my self at least one hour. That chicken weighs about 4 pounds so we’ll give it about an hour to cook in there. The internal temperature on the chicken I want to bring to at least 160 degrees. Once I take out of 160, it does a carry-over cooking. Whenever you roast meat, you always it rest when it comes out because the meats are muscles and as they come out and they cool off a bit they relax and during that relaxing period the juices are pushing moisture out of the cells. So, we take out the meat from the oven and place it to rest. The tissues tends to relax or to rest and during that process the juices are reabsorbed and back into the meat. And also another, juices are hollow than the meat itself so when it reabsorbs it, there’s a carry-over cooking and you get 5 or 10 degrees of carry-over cooking. So, if I take it our at 160 it’s going to raise at 165 to 170 for my carry-over cooking. So, once the chicken have been roasting for, once it comes to that temperature of 160 degrees, come from the oven and we’re going to have something much a little bit like this here. Now, that’s a trick. What we do is when you’re roasting your meat. Once I get the color that I want on the outside of the chicken I pretty cover on it and that will enable to continue to cooking but I keep my appearance. So, that’s a good thing to remember. Vinaigrette, I’m going to do three parts of olive oil and one part of vinegar. This is a champagne vinegar. This is an organic part also. It’s really nice. Now, once I’ve got that I have a little bit of my pinch of salt in there. Some fresh pepper and we have some fresh herbs there, another pinch of those. Now, this is the same herbs I used with the chicken so the flavors will blend themselves between the salad the roast chicken. Once that’s together, it’s very simple dressing. I give it a stir here. Once the chicken is ready, we place in the cutting board. I’m going to cut the string that we used to truss the chicken with. The first cut that I’m going to make is a straight the center of the chicken. We’re going to go right down the breast bone here and just follow. You can feel with the knife, just follow along the crack. It’s on the inside. You know when we were kids, grandmother had to cook everything in 900 degrees internal temperature I tell you and when you overcooked chicken at 160 I think it’s perfect. We take the temperature. We take a thermometer and you insert right between the thigh and the breast. We’ll go right in here and we’ll take our temperature because that’s the last. That’s always the last part of the chicken that will cook. You have a lot of bones down there and the meat has more fat so it takes a little bit longer for the heat to get in there. Let the blade of the knife just follow down on the carcass. Now, the cuts are make, the leg and the thigh coming together. If you cut it just right where the joints come together, the bone is soft. It’s very easy just to take the blade of the knife then push right through that soft part of the bone. Now, we’ve got our chicken together down the plate with my salad. But sometimes I mix with my tongs so like there I go. I put to use it. Listen, I go out with the woods with the bowl and knife. We’ll have dinner on the table one time. So now again, we just want enough dressing, you don’t want to overdress. You don’t have it swimming in dressing. We just want a kind of glisten the leaves. This is just right a little bit more and that’s good. Now, we’re going to have some plate with a few edible flowers here. I just want to put those a little bit here and here. Here we are roast chicken with herb crusted served with a mesculin lettuce salad. Thank you very much.