Garlic Rice Roast Chicken - Food Wishes

Hi, I'm Chef John from

food

wishes

.com with

roast

chicken

with

rice

and

garlic

, that's right, we've done

chicken

with

rice

and we've done chicken over rice and in rice, but I think this is the first time we're going to reverse that. . or as we used to say in the early 90's, flip the script and do the rice in the chicken and not stuff in the cavity, this experiment involved stuffing the rice under the skin and the results really were spectacular, so let's go ahead and get started What originally inspired this video was about a cup and a half of cold white rice left over from some Thai takeout, if you must know, and to that what we're going to do is add a whole bunch of freshly crushed

garlic

. or very, very, very finely chopped, we'll also add some freshly chopped herbs to the chicken, which in my case was thyme, rosemary and parsley, sorry, sage, and then we'll season it with a little freshly ground black pepper plus a generous pinch of kosher salt. like a little shake of cayenne pepper and then last but not least a pretty significant amount of melted butter and by the way if you melt the butter in a pan and then leave it there while it starts to cool it forms a kind of scaly crust. the top, which I only mentioned to explain that weird looking flaky crust on the top, but anyway, once everything is there, we'll go ahead and give it a mix and keep mixing until we're 100% sure that every grain of rice has been covered. that butter, at which point we should probably transfer it to the refrigerator as it will be much easier to work with once the butter hardens and while it cools we can move on to preparing our chicken and by preparation I mean sticking your fingers under it. the skin right where the back of the breast meets the cavity, okay, the skin is usually quite loose there and what we want to do here is take a kind of spatula or thin spoon and we'll slide it between the skin and the flesh loosen the skin all the way to the front of the bird, which if you do it with a spatula like this is pretty easy since raw chicken skin is very tough and doesn't break easily as long as you use something that doesn't really have edges sharp, it should work fine and if you notice, we go on both sides of the sternum, which, mainly for presentation purposes, we want the skin to stay attached and that's it once our skin has been successfully cleaned and If you do loosen carefully, we'll go ahead and transfer our chicken to a lightly greased oven-safe skillet or

roast

ing pan or I prefer a skillet as it's easier to make a skillet sauce later, but as long as it can go in the oven it's fine and then, what we're going to do is we're going to take our cold garlic rice mixture out of the refrigerator and we're going to proceed to stuff as much as we can under the skin of each breast and we know that there's no neat, elegant or classy way to just do this. take a little bit in your hands and push it in and then once you've squeezed a certain amount in there and it's starting to build up, what we can do is press and push our fingers along the surface working that mixture towards the front of the bird and it's very hard to tell you exactly how much you're going to be able to get in there, okay, if we really fill it too much, that skin might break like a rose or it might just start coming out of the opening, so I don't want to go with a crazy amount. , but I would say we want to try to get at least a two inch thick layer in there and no matter how much you manage to get in there, we want to make sure we're sliding. our fingers on the surface to shape the natural contours of the breast.

Okay, whenever you're going to enhance your breasts this way, we really want them to look natural, so you might have to shape them a little and then what? We'll make it with leftover rice, which I assume you'll have some of. We're going to go ahead and just add it to the cavity and of course any garlic rice that fell into the pan should be grabbed and also placed in the cavity and then what we're going to do once that's done is we're going to go ahead and tie our legs with a little piece of kitchen twine or plain dental floss, and by the way, that's technically optional, okay. of chefs say it doesn't make any difference, but on the other hand a lot of chefs say it does, especially the ones I learned from in cooking school, so mostly out of habit I tie mine and then before this goes to the oven, We'll want to give it a very generous salting or bottom and top and that's it, once the outside surface has been sufficiently seasoned, we'll go ahead and transfer that to the center of a 425 degree oven for about an hour or until that your bird is what you would consider safely cooked and if everything goes to plan it should look like one of the most beautiful roast chickens you've ever seen, I mean look at that, it's absolutely stunning.

Oh, and of course, since this pan has a handle. That's very hot, we'll always put a towel on top until it cools, but anyway what we're going to do at this point is transfer it to our cutting board to let it rest for about 5 or 10 minutes and while we wait, let's move on. and put that pan back on the stove over medium-high heat and we'll just add a little bit of sherry vinegar or vinegar of your choice to this pan drippings and we'll go ahead and bring it to a boil while scraping to glaze everything. that bottom goodness and that's it, you've just witnessed how to make the world's simplest pan sauce.

We've got those flavorful juices, that gloriously garlicky chicken fat, and a beautiful tangy, flavorful vinegar to balance everything perfectly and once it's boiled and reduced a bit. We can just put it out and serve it as is or if we want to give it a fancy touch we can strain it but the point is it's ready so I set it aside and went ahead and cut up my chicken and as I removed that section of the breast I was very happy From what I saw, the meat looked very moist and juicy and I thought the rice filling behaved quite well, I was afraid it would fall apart all over the place, but that really was the case.

In the case and beyond the appearance, man, that was delicious. Okay, if you had told me you would take the chicken and leave me with the rice, I would have been fine with that, so the rice tasted amazing, but I wanted to try everything. together, so I cut off a piece and drizzled on some of our quick and easy bread sauce and my friends were the perfect bite of

food

. It's very hard to describe how delicious it was, so I cursed them and went ahead and served it on a plate next to some beautiful stewed vegetables and since not all chicken has rice, I decide to place those pieces first and then cover it with those beautiful slices of skin and brisket before finishing with the fat from the pan and on top.

Beyond producing one of the most beautiful roast chickens I've seen in a long time, I found that stuffing that rice under the skin had three main benefits. Well, first of all, it isolated the breast meat, so it cooked a little slower, which means it didn't. dried while the dark meat finished cooking, this meat was extremely moist and juicy and then secondly, because he stretched the skin and separated it from the surface, that skin browned beautifully and became crispy and practically all the fat came off and there was none of that flabby fat that sometimes gets under the skin of a roast chicken and thirdly, speaking of rendered fat, guess where all that delicious chicken skin fat went, that's right, it was absorbed by the rice that was already delicious with the butter and garlic. and herbs, but that extra richness from the chicken fat took it to the next level.

Oh, and actually I should have said four benefits because I'm skipping one of the most obvious ones and that is being able to flavor the chicken from the inside out. or if you season the chicken on the outside, a lot of that just stays on the surface and doesn't really get into the meat, or even when you touch the meat, like we've done here, so let's update that to four official advantages. and perhaps the best news is that you could do this exact same technique using all kinds of different herbs, spices, and flavorings. I mean, after all, you are the john mitzvich, the third of your bird with garlic rice and I really hope you adopt this basic technique. and then create your own fabulous variations, but whether you decide to do that or make it exactly as shown, I really hope you try it soon, so follow the links below for ingredient quantities, a printable written recipe, and much more information. as always and as always I enjoy you