Hello friends. I am an absolute sucker for a good roast chicken recipe. As soon as I hear the words “roast chicken”, my mouth is watering and my stomach is rumbling. I’m sure I won’t be the only one.
If you were previously convinced that you know roast chicken, or how to do one right, well to that I say, I’m convinced that you don’t. This is a recipe forged through years of corrections, beginning from the inspiration of Thomas Keller’s roast chicken doused in thyme and garlic butter, and manipulated by my own techniques through experience, then re-polished through a vinegar bath anew. The chicken is not only accompanied by baby potatoes and garlics roasted inside its own grease, but – yes, I’m not done yet – but it has to, has to, be eaten with a runny sunny-side up. That’s right. Chicken and egg, I don’t know why you have to ask. This is now a roast chicken recipe, with its entirety, a simple elegant yet unbeatably tasty form of perfection, worthy of the ones who are willing to receive it justly.
Because, equally important to the recipe, there’s only a single, correct way to eat this chicken, or any roast chicken for that matter. One cannot claim to have had a proper roast chicken, if it wasn’t done this way. That is, you have to devour it with your absolute bare hands.
Assisted with a kitchen-scissor if needed, or not, I command you to tear apart this chicken from limb to limb with at least 8 of your best-able fingers. Undeterred by the occasional burns and shimmering under a coat of grease, your hands and your hands only, are the tool that’s going to snap the bones, tear through the flesh, pick up the crispy skin, pry the roasted garlics out from their husks, then sauce and mop everything up inside a puddle of thyme/garlic browned butter and runny yolks, and deliver them to the promised land. Then with ferocious enthusiasm, in a necessary if not religious finale, you’re going to pick through every last snippets of offerings adhering to the remaining carcass, the untold secrets of muscles around the neck, the films of meat in between the ribs, the skins along the back-bone and the twin crown-jewels of oysters… oh God oh God the oysters… Tell me you know where the fuck the oysters are, chicken-eaters!
Then at last, breath out, and let your rampant emotions settle. Use your remaining clean pinkies to wipe the grease off of your cheeks then lick them. Take a sip of water, then bow out.
