Where there's smoke...
Feb. 16th, 2004 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rscBack in junior high school I read an apparently famous essay by the 19th(?)-century English essayist Charles Lamb on the subject of roast pig, about which I remember little except that it started out with a fanciful explanation about primitive peoples whose method for roasting a pig involved setting one's hut on fire with the pig inside; by the time the hut had burned down, the pig was done. This method was eventually abandoned as inefficient.
I have a murky memory of a piece by the mid-20th-century American humorist S. J. Perelman, whose title ended with: or, How to Roast a Pig Without Burning Your House Down. I don't remember the first part of the title, or anything about the content of the piece.
Anyway, this is all by way of introduction to:
How to Roast a Chicken Without Burning Your House Down
Knowing that it was going to be very cold yesterday, I had bought a roasting chicken on Friday. When it came time to start working on it, as usual, I couldn't remember how long it was supposed to take, what the best method was, etc.; all I could remember was that every time I looked in more than one cookbook I would get contradictory information.
So this time I just looked in the latest addition to our culinary library: Cookwise by Shirley O. Corriher. This is mostly a "how and why" book, with some recipes thrown in. So I browsed through her section on roasting, and found a recommendation for "fast-roasting" a chicken, which means roasting it in a 500°F (260°C) oven for an hour or so, which she says produces a nice crispy skin whose effects permeate the meat without drying it out, and of course has the advantage that it takes less time than standard lower-temperature methods. This looked interesting, so we decided to try it. Of course she also recommended that you leave the chicken at room temperature for an hour first, which more or less did away with the time saving, but meant that we could have our cheese-and-crackers and cocktails before starting dinner preparation rather than while the chicken was roasting.
So we nibbled our cheese and crackers and sipped our sherry for a while, and then I went in and turned on the oven, and put the chicken into it with a quarter of an onion and two sprigs of rosemary in the cavity, and went about the business of cutting up vegetables for a sauté.
Of course it would never occur to Shirley Corriher to warn her readers that you shouldn't attempt this method if you can't remember the last time you cleaned your oven. About 20 minutes into the process, the smoke alarm (which is way too near the kitchen, if you ask me) started its manic shrieking. So I poked its shutoff button with the long dowel we keep handy for the purpose, which is supposed to make it shut up for about 10 minutes. I also opened the kitchen window in the hopes that when the timer expired the smoke would have dissipated (of course, the whole point was that it was cold outside, although with the 500° oven going the kitchen was quite warm enough), but long before the time expired the alarm went off again. John tried repeatedly to shut it up while I worked on the vegetables, but apparently when the smoke concentration reaches a certain point it ignores the shutoff order. Eventually he hung a sheet in the kitchen doorway, which succeeded in keeping the smoke away from the alarm. Of course it also meant that most of the smoke remained in the kitchen despite the open windows, which made us decide to eat in the dining room. and I was glad to reach the point in dinner preparation where I could leave things to cook for 5-10 minutes or so and get to a part of the house that wouldn't make my eyes sting.
The chicken was delicious (although it's not clear to me that it was that-all different from a chicken roasted for 1½-2 hours at 350°). We're going to clean the oven today.
I have a murky memory of a piece by the mid-20th-century American humorist S. J. Perelman, whose title ended with: or, How to Roast a Pig Without Burning Your House Down. I don't remember the first part of the title, or anything about the content of the piece.
Anyway, this is all by way of introduction to:
How to Roast a Chicken Without Burning Your House Down
Knowing that it was going to be very cold yesterday, I had bought a roasting chicken on Friday. When it came time to start working on it, as usual, I couldn't remember how long it was supposed to take, what the best method was, etc.; all I could remember was that every time I looked in more than one cookbook I would get contradictory information.
So this time I just looked in the latest addition to our culinary library: Cookwise by Shirley O. Corriher. This is mostly a "how and why" book, with some recipes thrown in. So I browsed through her section on roasting, and found a recommendation for "fast-roasting" a chicken, which means roasting it in a 500°F (260°C) oven for an hour or so, which she says produces a nice crispy skin whose effects permeate the meat without drying it out, and of course has the advantage that it takes less time than standard lower-temperature methods. This looked interesting, so we decided to try it. Of course she also recommended that you leave the chicken at room temperature for an hour first, which more or less did away with the time saving, but meant that we could have our cheese-and-crackers and cocktails before starting dinner preparation rather than while the chicken was roasting.
So we nibbled our cheese and crackers and sipped our sherry for a while, and then I went in and turned on the oven, and put the chicken into it with a quarter of an onion and two sprigs of rosemary in the cavity, and went about the business of cutting up vegetables for a sauté.
Of course it would never occur to Shirley Corriher to warn her readers that you shouldn't attempt this method if you can't remember the last time you cleaned your oven. About 20 minutes into the process, the smoke alarm (which is way too near the kitchen, if you ask me) started its manic shrieking. So I poked its shutoff button with the long dowel we keep handy for the purpose, which is supposed to make it shut up for about 10 minutes. I also opened the kitchen window in the hopes that when the timer expired the smoke would have dissipated (of course, the whole point was that it was cold outside, although with the 500° oven going the kitchen was quite warm enough), but long before the time expired the alarm went off again. John tried repeatedly to shut it up while I worked on the vegetables, but apparently when the smoke concentration reaches a certain point it ignores the shutoff order. Eventually he hung a sheet in the kitchen doorway, which succeeded in keeping the smoke away from the alarm. Of course it also meant that most of the smoke remained in the kitchen despite the open windows, which made us decide to eat in the dining room. and I was glad to reach the point in dinner preparation where I could leave things to cook for 5-10 minutes or so and get to a part of the house that wouldn't make my eyes sting.
The chicken was delicious (although it's not clear to me that it was that-all different from a chicken roasted for 1½-2 hours at 350°). We're going to clean the oven today.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-16 05:16 pm (UTC)I think you should prepare your next chicken via immersion in liquid oxygen, followed by a spark.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-16 05:48 pm (UTC)Not without an Urban Renewal permit from the city!
Re:
Date: 2004-02-16 06:47 pm (UTC)There wasn't that much smoke.
The thing is, it's easy to roast a chicken without burning the house down, but convincing your smoke alarm is a whole nother story.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-16 07:58 pm (UTC)No more problem for the oven setting it off.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-16 08:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-16 08:45 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-16 09:44 pm (UTC)Why the temporary shut off for 10 minutes can't work properly is another matter.