Vol. XVIII · Meat and Poultry Plate 7 of 11roast chicken, whole bird, breast and thigh, spatchcock, butterflying, turkey, dark meat, white meat, roasting, 烤鸡, carryoverHT

Roasting a Whole Bird.

The classic roast chicken problem: dry breast, or pink thighs. It is not the oven. It is the shape of the bird.

A chicken carries two kinds of meat. The breast is lean, fine-grained, white muscle; it is juiciest at 63–66 °C and dry by 75 °C (XVIII.3). The legs are dark, working muscle with more collagen and fat (XVIII.1); they are safe at 74 °C but are at their best at 80–85 °C, when their connective tissue softens. So the legs should end up hotter than the breast. On a whole bird the opposite tends to happen: the breast sits on top, exposed to the oven, while the thighs are tucked against the body and the cavity, where heat reaches them slowly.

Cooks have fought this in many ways: roasting breast-down first, shielding the breast with foil, icing the breast before roasting, or carving the legs off and returning them to the oven. The simplest fix is to change the shape. Spatchcocking — cutting out the backbone and pressing the bird flat — puts the legs out in the heat beside the breast, so they cook faster while the breast is unchanged, and the bird roasts in less time with crisper skin. The workshop roasts a 1.6 kg chicken three ways.

Below: centre temperatures of the breast and the leg of a chicken roasted at 200 °C (thermal bench), whole and timed by the legs, whole and timed by the breast, or spatchcocked and timed by the breast, with the targets of 65 °C for breast and 80 °C for legs, and the temperatures they reach after a 15-minute rest.

What you will learn
Workshop
Thermal bench, a teaching geometry: the breast as a 50 mm slab in full oven heat; the leg as a 65 mm cylinder, tucked against the body on the whole bird (a third of the oven's heat transfer) or spread out when spatchcocked (two-thirds). Oven 200 °C, from 5 °C; pulled when the breast reaches 62 °C or the leg 77 °C, then rested 15 minutes.

Flatten the bird, follow the breast

Whole and roasted until the legs are done, the bird takes about 67 minutes and its breast rests up to 79 °C — dry, having lost about 37 % of its weight. Taken out when the breast is right, at 57 minutes, the breast rests to 70 °C but the legs only reach 77 °C: safe, but chewy and pink at the joint. Spatchcocked, the same 57 minutes brings the breast to 70 °C and the legs to 85 °C — both where they should be.

To spatchcock: put the bird breast-down, cut along both sides of the backbone with kitchen shears and remove it (keep it for stock, XXII.1); turn the bird over and press hard on the breastbone to flatten it; tuck the wing tips. Dry-brine it a day ahead (XVIII.4), roast skin-up on a rack at 200–220 °C, and check the thickest part of the breast (pull at 60–63 °C) and the thigh near the bone (75 °C or more). For a whole bird, put the thermometer in the breast and the thigh both, and accept the compromise, or roast it breast-down for the first half. A turkey is the same problem, larger: spatchcock it, or roast the crown and legs separately.

At the stove

Roast a spatchcocked chicken and check both thermometer readings when you take it out. Then rest it 15 minutes and check again: the breast will have risen a few degrees, the legs less.

Spatchcock is an Irish and British word of the eighteenth century, perhaps from "dispatch cock", a bird split and grilled quickly; Italian pollo al mattone, "chicken under a brick", flattens it the same way.

Terms

Spatchcock
To remove the backbone and flatten a bird for roasting.
White meat
Lean breast muscle, best near 65 °C.
Dark meat
Leg and thigh muscle, richer in collagen and fat, best near 80–85 °C.
Crown
A bird's breast on the bone with legs and back removed.
Breast wants about 65 °C, legs about 80 °C, but on a whole bird the legs lag. Spatchcocking exposes the legs so both finish together; time it by the breast.

Sources

  1. USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, "Safe Minimum Internal Temperature Chart" (foodsafety.gov), 2024.
  2. A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.
  3. H. McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, 2nd ed., Scribner, 2004.