Transcription
“Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing?”
“I don’t think you can slate with oh.” [SLATE CLAP] [INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC]
“I’m Samin Nosrat, writer, teacher, and cook. I’m at the New York Times Cooking studio kitchen in New York City. And today we’re going to make buttermilk marinated roast chicken. This recipe is probably the recipe I’m most well known for, and it’s also probably the recipe I’ve made the most in my life. It’s my favorite way to cook chicken.
This video comes maybe eight years after the recipe was first published. I developed it when I was working at a restaurant called Ecolo in Berkeley. We had a beautiful rotisserie. Every day, we would have a different flavor of chicken. And I wanted to standardize it and just make it simple and the best. And I thought a lot about the chicken I grew up eating. My family’s from Iran, and our jujeh kebabs are often marinated in yogurt. I thought a lot about the history of our chef, whose parents were African-American, and how Black grandmas in the south, since time immemorial, have marinated chicken and buttermilk overnight before deep frying it. The lactose and the acids in buttermilk do so much magic to chicken overnight. It’s the best one ingredient marinade. All it takes is a little bit of forethought, doing it the night before. And then, it’s just the best chicken I’ve ever made.” [INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC]
“I, when I can, look for an organic or pasture raised chicken just because it’s going to taste better. But honestly, any chicken will work. You can choose to remove the wing tips or not. I remove them here, just after this first joint. Scissors are perfect. You could use a little paring knife. The key is to find where the wiggle begins and cut right there. And so you’re cutting through the joint and not through bone. And then these beauties go into my stock bag, which I always keep in the freezer.
And now, we’ll salt our bird. And I like to pick up salt with a five fingered pinch, like a big old five fingered pinch. Let me just show you why, actually. If I do this, which is I think what people think of as chef’s salting, this is precision salting. And this is a big piece of meat, and I want it to get evenly salted all across. So hence the big five fingered pinch. I picked up a lot of salt, but notice a lot of it’s not landing on the bird, and that’s fine. What is happening is, I’m getting a nice even coverage on both sides, and then inside, just a little bit for good luck -- not under the skin, just all over. You may look at this and think, oh my god, she put so much salt on that. So, I did not. This is about to go into a marinade, where some of the salt is going to wash off. And secondly, this is Diamond Crystal kosher salt. Of all the salts that are readily available to buy in this country and beyond, the least salty salt. And I also love it because it’s rolled into really fine flakes that have a larger surface area and stick better to whatever it is that you’re salting. If you’re using a different type of kosher salt or table salt, just take what I said about saltiness into consideration and adjust your amount.
So we’re going to let this sit for 30 minutes before we put it into the buttermilk brine. Because if we put it in right now, all the salt will just wash right off. I’m sure I’m going to get comments about the fact that I put chicken hands in the salt. I did do that. When I do it at home, I kind of have my chicken salt and my non-chicken salt, so.” [INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC]
“To make the marinade, we’re just going to basically season the buttermilk. So that’s 2 cups of buttermilk. I use a big Ziploc bag like this, or zip top plastic bag, so that I can use less buttermilk. And then, just some salt in there, that’s 2 tablespoons of kosher. If you’re not using kosher, you would want 1 tablespoon. And then, kind of just like mix it up. Over time, that salt will dissolve and become the right salinity to basically become a brine. So this becomes both a marinade and a brine. And then you just stick your salted chicken in there.
It’s helpful to work in a bowl like this because it keeps the liquid contained from spreading out. And then I just move it around to distribute it. Now, this chicken’s just going to hang out in the fridge overnight. I would say, minimum of 12 hours, ideally up to full 24 is great. People have asked me all the time, can it go too long? And two nights is fine. Even three nights is fine. But beyond that, the meat will start to get leathery, the salt will start pulling moisture out and dry out the meat. So I would say, three days is the max. I wrote that extra step of the salt and the waiting 30 minutes because I want to give the salt a head start and give the chicken a little bit of time to start absorbing the salt, so that the salt can start seasoning the chicken from within. You don’t have to. Just don’t skip the step of both salting the chicken and the brine. That’s how you’re going to get the total combo of all three ingredients to the right level of salinity, so that your chicken is going to be seasoned properly. Got it? Got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it?
This chicken has been marinating 24 hours. I’m still wearing the same clothes -- movie magic. Do take the opportunity to let as much buttermilk drain out of the cavity, back into the bag, before you bring it over to your workspace. It’ll just keep things a little neater.
While we think of roast chicken as one of the simplest foods to prepare, it actually is, in some ways, not a simple food, because it’s made of white meat and dark meat, which have totally different qualities and cook at totally different rates. Really, for me, the cue of when a chicken is cooked is, I will test right here in its tickle spot (LAUGHS) with a skewer or a thermometer. Make sure it’s at like 160-ish. Because it’s not a flat and even thing, we have to do our best as cooks to even it out before we put it in the oven, and also cook it in such a way, so that we’re letting the heat of the oven hit the parts that need to get cooked. So you just need a little piece of twine. You want to set one ankle right on top of the other and tie it nice and tight and go around an extra time. The thing is when you’re trussing, you have to remember that meat shrinks as it cooks, so you have to go as tight as possible now, so that it doesn’t fall out of the beautiful truss you’ve created.
The recipe calls for a cast iron pan. A cast iron will heat up evenly. It’ll retain its heat. It’s just a nice little warm container for cooking your chicken. If you don’t have a cast iron, or you’re using it for something else and you can’t put it in the oven at that time, it’s fine. You can use a baking sheet with a shallow rim. It’s of crucial importance for even cooking, and also to prevent the skin from splitting, to let your chicken come up to room temperature before you put it in the oven. You do want to take it out of the buttermilk. You want to truss it, and then you let it sit and come to room temperature. It takes about an hour, unless you’re in incredibly warm and tropical temperatures.
This was like a trick I learned from watching a Jacques Pepin video like a million years ago. But basically, the hottest part of the oven, no matter what kind of oven you have -- gas, electric, convection, whatever, the hottest part is always going to be the back corners. Since we don’t know which back corner is the hottest, we’re going to split the difference and put the legs of the chicken toward the back for about half the cooking time, and then flip it so that the other leg is facing the back, so that you’re getting the majority of the heat on the legs and the less of the heat on the breast. And that is another way to prevent overcooking your breasts.
It’s been about 20 minutes, so I’m going to turn it down to 400. I like to start the bird in a hotter oven to get the browning going as quickly as possible, to get the browning train running. But if it cooks at 425 the whole time, sometimes it’ll get a little too dark. So that’s just it. And then, 400 is a nice gentle temperature to let it finish cooking at. And so now it’s been another 10 minutes. So we’re halfway through the cooking time, so we can turn the bird. Let’s check on the chicken. That couldn’t be more beautiful. Look at that. It’s been, I think, just over an hour. Our chicken is burnished and beautiful. The legs truly just, like, should wiggle and give no resistance. We’re going to let this sit for a minute. Actually, 10 minutes. And then we’ll come back, and I’ll carve into it and taste it. The thing about resting is, don’t skip it. It gives meat the time, the proteins, time to relax. Juices distribute evenly. They’re a lot less likely to immediately come out. You’ve worked so hard with your brining and the time to get that chicken to be moist. You don’t want all of the juice to come rushing out as soon as you cut into it, so give it the 10 minutes to rest.
When you’re breaking down a chicken, it’s important to have a sharp knife with a thin blade, so that you can get all the way in. Just cut into this skin right here to open it up. And you’ll see the legs will start to fall immediately back. This is quite a hot bird, still. So you can use the tongs to help you out. Want to go -- this is the oyster, so let’s make sure we go get all of that oyster meat off. There I go. It is hard to work on a hot bird, but it’s worth it. There’s a breast bone that goes down the center. So before you cut that first breast off, score it on both sides. That’ll help you get the maximum amount of meat off. And then, it’ll just basically peel right off. And I like to go right behind that wing tip that we kept on, so I get a nice fancy looking restaurant chicken breast. There we go. O.K. I’ll cut those into smaller pieces. But first, snacks. It’s so good. It’s been a while since I’ve made one of these. There’s a little tang in the chicken from the buttermilk. It’s so salty in the best way, all the way down. Even this meat I’m picking off the carcass is nice and seasoned. And then if you’re real tricky, you know what you can do is take all of this stuff and turn it into the base for a delicious dressing and make a bread salad, a la Judy Rodgers, Zuni Café, to serve with your chicken, like arugula and croutons and all the chicken drippings.
So here we have the beautiful, simple, elegant, delicious, never fail buttermilk-brined roast chicken. I mean, the thing about this chicken is, I tend to be like always thigh, always thigh. But every piece is a winner. But I’m still going to do thigh. O.K. (LAUGHS) It’s just the most tender, moist, delicious, well-seasoned chicken you’ll ever have. It’s truly no fail. The beauty of this recipe is its simplicity. But also, you can start to think of that as a blank slate that you can use to improvise. You can add herbs. You can add spices. You can add other flavors into that buttermilk as you get more and more comfortable with this recipe. And I’ve done that, too. In my upcoming cookbook, Good Things, I went back to where my inspiration for this chicken came from, which was the Persian dish for jujeh kabob. And I turned my buttermilk chicken back into a jujeh kabob roast chicken. So I’ve combined all of my cooking past and cooking flavors in one recipe. I feel like we should finish this video, so these guys can come eat some. You can find this recipe on newyorktimescooking.com. And it’s a winner, so I hope you like it.” [INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC]