Herby salsas are much loved in Catalan cooking, so, inspired by a recent trip to Barcelona, I’ve embellished this chicken and these rich, stock-cooked potatoes with a vibrant nutty number.
Spatchcock chicken—also known as butterflied chicken—is the easiest way to roast a whole bird, full stop. Removing the backbone and flatteningout the bird allows the breast meat and leg meat to reach their target temperatures—around 150°F for the breast and 165°F for the legs—at the same time, which is a challenge whenever roasting a whole chicken (unless you truss it, which is another lesson for another cookbook). Another trick for roast chicken excellence is rubbing the meat with an intensely flavored spice paste, and the North Afri- can-inspired one I use in this recipe is a delicious blend that will give the chicken’s skin a beautiful brown hue, and works equally well on pork, fish, and slow-roasted meats.
If you like hash browns but want something healthier, the sweet potato hash that follows is a dish I make a lot for my sons when I want to work some extra nutrients into their supper (which is always).
BILL: My mom was a generous woman, known for giving out $20 red envelopes on Chinese New Year (this was the 1970s, when you could buy a loaf of bread for 25 cents!). So when she hosted her friends for mah-jong on weekends, true to form, she went all out, cooking a dinner as extravagant as a Chinese New Year meal. There would always be a baak chit gai (Cantonese for “white cut chicken”), a dish that amplifies chicken to its purest form. A poached chicken may not sound like much, but it’s Cantonese home cooking at its best, featuring silky meat (described as waat, meaning “slippery” in Cantonese) that gets dipped into a ginger-scallion oil. The quality of the chicken matters here, so buy the best you can find. We buy fresh Buddhist style chickens at our local Chinese market, which still have the head and feet on. A whole chicken sym- symbolizes family unity and prosperity, and because none of the skin has been torn or removed, the meat is protected from drying out during cooking.
This recipe hits all the flavor notes of KFC, Korean Fried Chicken—sweet, salty, spicy, extremely savory. But instead of going through the trouble of setting up a deep fryer or panfrying on the stovetop, which is always a pain and a mess, this is a just-as-delicious recipe for the oven that will impress your family and friends. Please have a lot of napkins handy.
This is a classic roast chicken—herb-scented and bronze-skinned—that’s been vamped out with crispy mushrooms cooked in the same pan.
To infuse smashed potatoes with savory chicken drippings, we butterfly a chicken and roast it on top of a bed of potatoes.