New York Times
Feb 23 2005
In Quest of the Perfect Roast Chicken
By JULIA MOSKIN
ROAST chicken used to be a rare treat at American dinner tables, a
ceremonial meal fit to honor a visiting preacher or a patriarch’s
birthday. Today we are eating far more chicken but cooking it less
and less.
American consumption of chicken overall has more than doubled since
1970, according to the Agriculture Department, and supermarket
rotisserie chickens make up a substantial part of that increase. The
Grocery Manufacturers of America, an industry research group, says
that Americans now spend more than $2.5 billion on supermarket
rotisserie chickens every year. The Costco chain, which sold no roast
chickens a decade ago, sold 22 million in 2004 alone.
“I consider the perfect roast chicken my own Holy Grail,” said Ly
Phan, a Vietnamese-American living in Brentwood, Calif. But, she
said: “I don’t want to learn to make it. I just want to be able to
buy it.”
A reliable place to buy a good roast chicken has become an important
quality-of-life matter for those too busy to cook. “I buy a chicken
here every Sunday, and I eat it all week,” Paul Griscom said at the
Whole Foods Market at Columbus Circle. “I used to live close to
Fairway, and I was nervous about moving away from those chickens. But
the ones here are even better.” At Whole Foods and elsewhere, the
price of a whole roasted organic chicken is almost the same as a raw
one.
Roasting a chicken at home may become a domestic throwback, like
darning socks or putting up peaches.
Mr. Griscom said that he doesn’t know how to roast a chicken. “I
know, it’s supposed to be so easy,” he said. “But how would I know
when it was done?”
In New York City buying a great rotisserie chicken means choosing
your quest. You can find a great chicken: organic, free-range,
antibiotic-free, minimally seasoned and expertly roasted, with a
rounded chickeny flavor. Or you can find a great recipe, an explosive
convergence of lime and lemon juice, soy sauce, garlic, cumin, apple
cider vinegar, chili paste and countless other possibilities that
produce highly seasoned meat and skin. Chicken goes global in New
York: the city’s favorite birds are Peruvian and Dominican, kosher
and halal, Chinese and Tuscan and flavored with things like annatto
(the Puerto Rican-style ones at Casa Adela on the Lower East Side)
and yogurt (the Afghan birds at Kabul Cafe in Brooklyn).
Across the country a passion for roast chicken seems to transcend the
normally stubborn ethnic boundaries of American cuisine: chicken
chains have cult followings. Los Angelenos worship Zankou’s Armenian
chicken and its pungent garlic sauce; Brasa Roja’s chickens with
salsa verde are loved in Chicagoland; and in Dallas, Cowboy Chicken
is famous for Tex-Mex enchiladas stuffed with leftover meat from its
hickory wood-roasted chickens.
Allegiances can be fierce. Williams Bar-B-Cue, a legendary chicken
joint on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, closed last month, and
locals took it like a death in the family; it had been roasting
chickens at the same spot since 1952. The tangy crisp skin and
pleasingly greasy meat of the Williams chicken and its pseudobarbecue
flavor were addicting. “The smell of Williams is a neighborhood
institution and should be preserved at the Smithsonian,” declared
Adam Peretz, mourning outside the store last week.
New York’s new chicken capital is Jackson Heights, Queens, where
Mario’s Colombian chickens duke it out with the Peruvian ones at La
Casa del Pollo and Pollo Don Alex. Raul Rojas, the owner of Super
Pollo on Northern Boulevard, said that Peruvians are the acknowledged
masters of pollo brasado. “We are the only ones who use soy sauce,
because we have the Japanese population,” he said. “Soy and garlic
make the best chicken.”
Colombian cooks often add a little vinegar to the marinade for roast
chicken, he added.
The birds of New York’s army of Latin American cooks, often marinated
in citrus, are juicy and savory. Mario’s (Colombian), Los Pollitos
(Mexican-Ecuadoran) and El Malecon (Dominican) compete by adding
complex rubs and darkly lacquered skin. Most of the Latin American
chickens have fabulous skin, but the breasts tend to be dry.
(Chinese-style roast chickens, which are mildly flavored with star
anise and soy, have the tenderest meat. They are steamed before
roasting.)
Gilbert Arteta, who grew up near Medellín, Colombia, said the smell
of chicken roasting over a wood fire makes him homesick. “It’s only
the chicken that does that to me,” he said. Mr. Arteta lives near a
Chicken Out in Gaithersburg, Md., and said he loves the smell,
although the chicken itself does not do much for him. “It’s not like
the chicken I grew up with,” he added.
Chicken Out, a 26-unit chain in the Washington suburbs, makes a
pleasant chicken that tastes like chicken, not like rosemary or
roasted garlic or cumin. The restaurants use only chickens that are
antibiotic-free and fed on organic grain and, most radically, they
must be sold immediately from the rotisserie. After an hour they are
recycled into chicken salad or chicken pot pie.
Recycling leftover roast chicken has become an American culinary
subspecialty.
“We go through three or four chickens a week,” Marisol Castellano
said, pushing a full cart through the Hackensack, N.J., Costco last
weekend with four children in tow. “I buy eight chickens at a time,
and then I put them in pasta and sandwiches, sometimes empanadas or
quesadillas or chilaquiles.”
Three cookbooks on “cooking” with rotisserie chicken have been
published since 2003, and recipes for chicken salad have become an
art form on Internet recipe sites.
If you are buying rotisserie chickens with an eye to leftovers, it is
a good idea to look for birds with as little seasoning as possible,
no twiggy herb crusts or maple glazes to assert their flavors in
another recipe.
Places with high turnover have the moistest chicken: once cooked, it
dries out quickly. Bigger birds are less likely to be overcooked. And
if crisp skin is your goal, unwrap the chicken as soon as you can.
Even a few minutes in an airtight container can be enough to steam
the skin soft.