I Made Heston Blumenthal's Chicken

Have you ever seen a recipe that looked so wild and out there, you can't help but feel like you need to try it at least once in your life? That's how I felt when I saw Heston's recipe for crispy roast chicken. You start off by brining the chicken in an 8% salt solution for 6 hours, soaking the chicken in clean water for 1 hour to remove the excess salt, removing the wing tips, boiling the chicken for 30 seconds to tighten the skin, plunging the chicken in ice water to stop the cooking process, boiling the chicken for 30 seconds again, plunging in the ice water again, leaving it to dry out overnight in the fridge, roasting at 140F (60C) for a couple of hours, searing with a pan fry, browning a large dollop of butter with the wing tips to create chicken-flavoured brown butter, and injecting the chicken with the butter. No, I'm not joking. I did make a few modifications to the recipe to suit my own needs. First of all, I roasted the chicken on the stovetop using Adam Ragusea's trick to cook the legs without overcooking the breasts. Second, I broiled the chicken on top of searing the breasts with a pan fry to crisp the skin. Third, I had to put the chicken in at 170F because that's how low my oven goes. Finally, I skipped the butter injection.

My experience was kind of meh. For starters, either I was using a bad chicken or Heston neglected to mention how tearable the chicken's skin becomes after blanching. I accidently ripped a large part of the breast skin while pulling it out of the boiling water, and I noticed that the skin around the leg joint was also ripping just from its own weight. In hindsight, I should have left the chicken tied up until it was time to serve. Another thing is that Heston really understated how hard it is to sear the chicken. Letting your chicken go low and slow is great if you love to undercook your chicken, but it does absolutely nothing for the skin. I knew that would be the case, but I didn't realize how hard it would be to compensate for. Heston said that deepfrying the chicken would be a step too far, but I think that it would be a great if you happen to already be deepfrying a side. If you have a convection oven, hanging the chicken and blasting the chicken at the highest temperature will do wonders. A rotisserie would also be good, but most people don't have one. A much more serious thing that Heston didn't mention is that the low and slow approach keeps the chicken in the danger zone for a long time. Despite cooking the chicken very thoroughly, there is some risk involved in this. I consider the risk to be small for me, but this shouldn't be given to the elderly or the immunocompromised. (A more detailed chart for the danger zone suggests that this cooking method isn't actually dangerous at all, but I don't know enough about food safety to tell if this is sound. This isn't a mainstream view among food safety experts, so make of that what you will). Something that's my fault, and something you have to be very careful to avoid, is not leaving the chicken to dry for long enough. I only left the chicken in the fridge for a couple hours, but you really want to leave it for half a day, maybe even a full one. The dry skin is what makes the chicken crispy, and like I said, you're already facing an uphill battle on that front. When I did this recipe, I actually ended up with a chicken that was less crispy than when I do it normally. Really, no point in trying to rush a recipe that requires over 10 hours no matter what.

I don't know if it was because of the brine, but I found the chicken slightly tough. I wouldn't call it bad at all, but the breasts weren't as tender as I'm used to. Having meat that's salted all the way through is nice, though. The wings were ridiculously tender. It would be extreme to make this recipe just for the wings, but if you like wings, definitely factor that into your decision about whether or not to make this. The meat was evenly cooked all the way through, which wasn't a big thing for me, but I could understand how that would be major for other people. The browned butter wasn't my thing. I never make brown butter, so the nutty notes threw me off. That's obviously something that depends on the person, though, and it's not like you have to make the butter if you don't want to.

I think the major takeaway that should be had from this recipe is that the quality of the meat matters. I was just using a normal supermarket bird, which was raised to be cheap protein for a normal meal. A recipe this refined is really best used on a heritage chicken, or at least a farm chicken that's packed with flavour. I don't regret making this recipe with a normal chicken, and I honestly might do it again to see if I can get that crispy skin I crave so much, but this isn't the kind of thing that you would have the energy to do on a regular basis. If you're making a special occasion chicken dinner, it only makes sense to have a top-quality chicken.