“We can learn to be cooks but we must be born knowing how to roast.” -Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin as quoted in Jeffrey Steingarten’s “As the Spit Turns” in It Must Have Been Something I Ate (Knopf).
“Some people roast a chicken and then peel off and discard the skin. What is the point? If you can’t stand the skin, stay out of the chicken.” -Steingarten himself in “As the Spit Turns”
I shudder a bit when the oven in our backyard at the cottage is referred to as the “pizza oven”. I do it myself because “wood-fired oven” is cumbersome and “outdoor brick oven” even more so but I really don’t want it to be thought of as some one-trick pony. The oven’s on an island away from the tentacles of the homogenized orange pizza delivery empire but still it was a lot of work and uses a lot of wood to just make one dish, no matter how delicious. That’s why when the oven was being lead through the curing process (days of low, long fires to gently drive the moisture out of the masonry) I made a point to cook a variety of dishes. Pulled pork for tacos, steak grilled over coals, and probably best of all, roast chicken.
The guys at The Paupered Chef have written more than one post about roast chicken (my favourite of their methods is the recipe that calls for croutons under the chicken to catch the fatty drippings). I’m not as roast chicken obsessed as they are but it is a dish I think a lot about and I thought I might be able to use a rotisserie to roast a chicken in the brick oven. (more…)