If you like the taste of chicken, you will love this dish. It has exactly four ingredients: Chicken, lemons, salt and pepper. Not other seasonings, oils or anything. But, if done right, it results in the tastiest, moistest most tenderest chicken you can imagine. And we have a new crop of Meyer lemons ripening up, along with another new bloom, so I figured why the fuck not?
Here's the recipe:
I did decide to try a little experiment with this. I've done this recipe before in our old, crusty roasting pan, but the skin always stuck to the pan before the 20 minute mark when you turn it over, making some of the skin peel off. Be we have a new, shiny pan now so I decided to do two birds, one in each pan, and see which came out better. Would they both stick? Also, I got one down to earth working class California chicken, and a sustainably raised organic bird from some elite processor in Nebraska, which also cost 50% more. Of course I put the working class bird in the working class pan and the elite bird in the shiny new one.
In deference to Roux, I added the wine a little earlier in the process this time. It's a Central Coast Rhone style blend of mostly Mourvedre, Grenache and Syrah.
Before you stuff the lemons in the cavity you have to roll them under the palm of your hand to try and break down some of the membranes inside, and then poke them a bunch of times with a fork.
Here they are, rolled and poked:
They might seem a little green, but these Meyer lemons are actually a hybrid of a citron and a mandarin (not actually lemons at all) and are sweeter and more juicy, with thinner skin, than the lemons you usually see in the grocery store. The flavor when they're still a little green is pretty close to the store-bought lemons. Later on they still taste like lemons, but not quite as sour.
Here are the birds, seasoned, stuffed, trussed and put in their proper places, ready to go into the oven with the breast side down. Some trolls here might get a little worked up looking at this picture, but that's not my problem.
After 20 minutes, they're just starting to turn a little brown, you take them out and flip them over. You can see that the working class bird lost some of its skin. The the other one is completely intact - no stickage on the smooth pan.
Because these are both five pound birds, I adjusted the time of the middle section, between turning them after 20 minutes and turning up the heat at the end, to make the total cooking time 120 minutes.
Here they are after removing from the oven. Not much difference in the final product except the one on the left has the skin intact and the pan juices, which are incredible, are easier to recover. Next time I'll definitely be using the newer pan.
Mrs. Mikey and I each had a leg, along with a bowl of Saturday's minestrone. This was an awesome combination. The legs were so tender I hardly had to cut them to separate them from rest of the carcass. The texture was almost like a confit.
So now I have a big pile of leftover chicken to play with, and the carcasses are slow cooking in some water to make a bone broth.
