However, to set up for an easy dinner tomorrow and keep away from the sugar, butter, and eggs (that’s it! well, and a bit of vanilla…) I picked up a pizza dough recipe I looked at recently. I’ve talked before about Rouxbe, the online resource for cooking tips, recipes, and lessons. They’re star people, and Dawn and Joe have both been supporters of my food adventures, answering questions and giving plenty of advice along the way. I’ve been a member for a long time now. Funny enough, Joe remembers me for starting the conversation about how even trained chefs eat Costco hot dogs - I’ve got to work my way up from that!

To give you a taste of what they have to offer, I’ll let them show you the recipe preview (Flash required):

They offer this high quality video detailing step-by-step all parts of a recipe, with tips sprinkled throughout (see "Related Techniques" above) that boost your knowledge. The dough slow-rises in the refrigerator overnight, so I’ve done the first part tonight and will do the rest tomorrow - plus, I now have dough in the freezer ready for another day.

That’s not the best part. Last week, they (finally!!) launched the Rouxbe Cooking School, a partnership with the Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver. This is something I wanted to see years ago - this is the sort of instruction and comprehensive learning facility that is missing without actually leaving my career and changing worlds. I’ve read all sorts of instruction on technique and skills, and consider myself reasonably capable in a kitchen, but actually seeing it and going through all the details is a wonderful experience. It’s high quality, and perfect for the enthusiastic cook like me with a day job.

Here’s a taste of the cooking school lessons:

I really can’t say enough good things about what these folks have done, both in growing an online community, providing good video recipes that are easy to follow, and now especially to publish a curriculum like this.

Ding! Laundry’s done. Off to bed now - I’ll let you know how the pizza turned out tomorrow.

CHAI
Makes 5 cups

4 C water
1 C milk
5 black peppercorns
10 cloves
5 cardamom seeds
1 stick cinnamon
1 star anise… star? pod? thing.
5 bags of black tea (or 5 spoonfuls of loose tea)
5 big (soup) spoons of sugar

Lightly crush the spices. Add water and spice to a pot and bring to a boil. Remove from heat, cover, and steep for 10 minutes.
Bring back to a boil, remove from heat, and add tea. Steep for 5 minutes.
Strain and discard spices/tea leaves. Add milk and sugar to taste - the sugar helps bring out the spice in the tea.
Enjoy!

Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good. - Alice May Brock

Summertime is here in full swing. Astounding high heat, muggy high humidity, mosquitos known for carrying off small children - all of these characterize the mid-year months in the swamplands of Houston. (It’s a great city. Really.) On top of this, because of some changes at work, I’ve rejoined the commuter world. For the last two years, I’ve had the pleasure of being almost exclusively a home-worker, with a fifteen step travel to the office. (Twenty if I stop for coffee first.) Now, I’m up early to take the bus into downtown, which takes me a little over an hour each way. It’s worse if I drive, unless I can commute at some bizarre mid-day hour to avoid traffic. I’m getting up earlier, getting home later, getting less done in the middle, and yet somehow come out ahead.

This is also the busiest time of year for Christine as a wedding photographer. She’s had back-to-back-to-back weddings every weekend all summer, with engagement shoots during the week. Plus, she’s taken over management of Wholly Matrimony! and is putting a lot of effort into building that site further. She’s a total rockstar, but she’s working as much if not more than I am at the moment.

As one can imagine, this puts a bit of a crimp in my cooking style. We are just-in-time shoppers, often dashing to the store to grab ingredients in time to get dinner cooked and on the table. This is okay if I can sneak away from home in the middle of the afternoon, but not so cool when I’m not getting home until much later. I’ve come close to refocusing this site on restaurant reviews (topics such as a comparative analysis of McDonald’s franchise decisions between stand-alone locations, inside Wal-Mart, and in the Chevron station, or how to convince a picky teenager that he’ll really like the Asian restaurant) instead of cooking. Hey - they can’t all be four star meals…. Instead, however, I’m finding ways to make time to cook. Either we eat later, or I prep food for a few days, or we eat even simpler. I’m not fully back in my routine yet, but getting there.

Thus, it’s a treat to find something easy to prepare, light on the diet, not too bad for the wallet either, and that Jason will eat eagerly. I really didn’t expect him to jump at poisson en papillote (Fish! In a paper bag!) but he’s become a devoted fan.

(Before we get to that - the astute reader with the long memory will recall a different site design previously. Recognizing that I tend now to write much fewer posts but much more in-depth, this site has moved to more of a magazine-style format. It feels like a better fit, and while I’m sure to be tweaking things often, I think this will remain for some time. Feel free to comment and give feedback on the change. Now, back to the fish.)

As always, we turn to Ruhlman’s The Elements Of Cooking for a basic understanding:

En papillote means in paper, usually oiled parchment paper. Food cooked en papillote, often fish or other delicate meat, is steamed, so the flavors of high heat aren’t associated with it; thus other flavors should be introduced within the package, such as aromatic vegetables; additional herbs, spices, or even marinades can be used and sometimes the item can be seared before being sealed in the paper pouch. The benefits are that it’s a fat-free method of cooking (though some compound butter can be added for flavor), all the flavors remain in the packet until the packet is cut open, and serving an item en papillote creates a dramatic preparation. The tricky part is knowng when the item is done, so it’s best to follow a tested recipe to get a sense of timing for the specific kind of item you’re cooking…. (Ruhlman p. 184)

The hit has been a filet of orange roughy, about a half pound each, which is a delicate and very mild white fish. There’s a good seafood counter at a local grocery store here, with excellent quality fish, and the roughy is one of the most affordable of the mild white fishes. Not knowing how the rest of the family would take to stronger fish, but not wanting to have the house smells like dead fish for days, I decided to stick with the mild at first. This fish is cooked simply with butter, lemon, and a bit of white wine, which yields an unbelievably good sauce in the packet. A later addition to the preparation has been thinly sliced leeks as a bed under the fish in the packet.

There are echoes to one of the first recipes I came across but never tried - The Surreal Gourmet’s Dishwasher Salmon. It’s exactly the same approach - salmon filets packed with herbs in foil pouches, but cooked in the top rack of a dishwasher instead of an oven. Or on the car engine while driving around the neighborhood. While I haven’t been that brave - yet - it’s a technique seen over and over in many unrelated places.

True to the recipe, I cut big heart-shaped pieces of parchment paper, prepared the bundles, and crimped the edges of the paper around the fish. This does make for a great presentation, and having a heart shape really does help, although I suspect the next time I do this I’ll crimp the edges and use a stapler - it’ll cut about half of the preparation time out of the recipe. Think a bit about the presentation when assembling the packet, and layer appropriately.

This is a bit fiddly to get out of the paper packet properly for serving - the roughy is so tender as to fall apart if even looked at it the wrong way. Instead, I try to serve as-is in the packets, as shown in the picture. (Note to self - really try to find some more contrasting plates, as white packets on white plates on a white counter just isn’t quite cutting it. Nor is your camera phone.) If you can get it out, go for it, but DO NOT FORGET to pour out every drop of the sauce from the packets - it’s divine!

Orange Roughy en papillote (Fish! In a paper bag!)

Serves 2.

• 2 filets of orange roughy, each approx. 8 oz.
• 6 slices of lemon
• 3 Tbsp. butter, divided
• 2 leeks, white and light green, cleaned and very thinly sliced
• 3-4 Tbsp. white wine (chardonnay is excellent)
• salt, pepper
• chopped parsley

Preheat oven to 425 degF. Cut large hearts of parchment paper so that each fish filet fits on one half of the heart with some margin around it for crimping.

Place the leeks, wine, fish, salt, pepper, lemon slices, butter, and parsley on the parchment paper. Fold over and crimp, working your way around the edges and crimping a little more each time. Make sure the seal is tight, as this is important to holding in the steam and getting everything to cook well. Prepare the second packet in the same manner.

Place on a cookie sheet and bake in the oven for about 10 minutes until the paper is very puffed and lightly browned. Remove from the oven and serve - suggestion is to place each packet on its plate and cut open the paper in front of each diner. Enjoy a criminally easy, sophisticated meal!

And happy belated 8th birthday to my blog (born 25 June 2000). I’ll pull links from the internet archive to show just how far it’s come.

Cheers!

A couple of posts ago, Geoff asked me if I had turned to the dark side:

Instant Jasmine Rice? It sounds like an abomination and doubtless very bad for the environment. Please say that you haven’t sold out like Delia?

Rest assured, instant rice isn’t part of my normal repertoire. In fact, I’ve blogged about the two times I’ve used instant/minute rices on this blog - a previous foray into instant brown rice (curse you, Uncle Ben!) and this move to boil-in-a-bag jasmine rice. The brown rice is passable for a quick lunch, the jasmine rice came out much nicer. Time permitting, or serving this to other guests, I’m much more likely to make the rice from scratch.

I did some digging, and couldn’t find any environmental concerns regarding instant rice. According to McGee [1],

Quick-cooking rice is manufactured by cooking white, brown, or parboiled rice, thus disrupting its cell walls and gelating its starch, then fissuring the grain in order to speed the infiltration of hot water when the consumer cooks it, and finally drying it. The fissuring may be accomplished with dry heat, rolling, microwave treatments, or freeze-drying.

In plain English, unless I miss the mark, this means that it is cooked some to tease the starch out of the rice kernel, cracked open so water can soak into the rice faster when finally cooked, then dried for preservation. Aside from basic process concerns - what to do with the water from cooking the rice, where to get the energy involved in fissuring and drying the rice, etc - I don’t see any particular environmental impact to quick-cooking rice.

However, I did turn up some other interesting information during the research, and some useful resources. The Cereal Knowledge Bank, provided in collaboration by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), is an excellent source of information about the growing, harvesting, and science that really goes into rice production. This includes information on environmental concerns, real facts about the rice shortages and skyrocketing prices of food among much much more. It surprised me to see such a think tank exist for a basic, almost commodity grain, until I recalled something Paul Collier (an economics professor at Oxford University) said in a comment on a piece by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times:

Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies.

(The rest of the comment is excellent. Originally spotted it at Marginal Revolution.) There really is a lot of science that goes in to modern agriculture - my big "duh!" moment - but also a strong need to promote (and popularize) the adoption of scientific advancement in farms on a global scale. While I’m in support of raising awareness for improved conditions for growers such as Fair Trade initiatives that promise a living wage to be paid to coffee growers (and sidestepping any economic debate about price floors or how this actually affects supply and demand), it is just as important to realize that we can improve on these practices and make better use of available farmland.

The second point I’ve been thinking about is a statement I made in a post in January, when I kicked off this food blogging effort:

I believe mainly in classical preparations and food that has an evocative history or culture over modern adaptations or replications.

The Blurker Gone Bad called me out for a better explanation of what I meant. I’ve been working on answering that question since then, and still lack some real crisp sound bite that explains it, so please bear with me for a slightly verbose explanation.

Let’s start with an example. Choucroute Garnie. Here’s the Wikipedia entry - it’ll do as well as any recipe for this purpose, and I’ve not made it at home, only had it at restaurants. Essentially it’s a hot bowl of sauerkraut, pork in all its glorious forms, and potato, all boiled together, served with a hot mustard and a crisp glass of dry Riesling. Done properly, when you taste this, you can close your eyes and see the banks of the Rhine river from a steep mountainside covered in vineyards where they make Riesling.

By contrast, tell me what images are conjured up by, say, this recipe for frank ‘n beans?

Okay, maybe not the most fair comparison, but hopefully an illustrative one. I have a similar problem with fusion cuisine at times. I’ve been to some fantastic fusion restaurants (Dekxels leaps to mind) and had some wonderful food, but it’s more of an intellectual exercise rather than something I can emotionally connect with. It is interesting to see how two normally unconnected cuisines can come together and complement each other, but I get no sense of … identity, I suppose … about the meal.

Think for a moment of the housewife one to two hundred years ago - let’s go with nineteenth century. Exotic foods were not nearly as readily available as they are today. Neither is there an abundance of knowledge of, say, wok technique in northern France. The farmer’s wife kept her family fed with the materials and ingredients locally available, and with ingenuity - braising can make the toughest meat into a mouthwatering meal, for example. These combinations of flavors and seasonings have stood the test of time and strongly evoke a region or locality when brought together.

For dinner tonight, I made poulet au pot - a poached chicken with some vegetables in a broth. The broth was seasoned with thyme, black pepper, leeks, parsley - all things I equate with northwestern Europe (NW France/Germany). If I had changed out, say, parsley for oregano and brought in some garlic, I’d suddenly be in the Mediterranean. Pull it all out and go with garlic, ginger, and mushrooms, and I think of China. These flavor combinations [2] are a means to connect with a food’s history and identity. I have a problem with modern cookbooks that promote replacing butter with miniscule amounts of olive oil and masking the switch with large amounts of garlic or crushed red pepper. It may be perfectly fine and even delicious, but soul-destroying all the same.

At the same time, family traditions and personal signature dishes are also part of the joy of cooking. I make (Christine’s recipe) a stroganoff with tomato juice, egg noodles, and ground beef that bears only a passing resemblance to any stroganoff I’ve come across, yet remains a family favorite. I have a recipe tucked away for headless gingerbread men [3]. These stories and familiar things are part of family life, and equally important. These are things that have been imbued with a soul or identity because of these common experiences, something that say "home". I’m not trying to say that we should all cook like turn-of-the-century French housewives, although there’s a LOT of good stuff in there. However, I don’t hold bastardized low-fat low-carb low-calorie low-everything food movements in anything close to the same regard.

Okay, folks, this post has taken nearly two hours and most of my Macbook battery life to come together. I need to be asleep. For the moment, I’ll put in a skeleton of today’s recipe and come back and flesh it out later. This is what I made for dinner tonight, nice and light and generally good for you.

Poulet au pot (Chicken in a pot)
Serves 4-6

• 1 chicken, about 3.5-4 lb.
• 8 carrots, trimmed and cut into chunks
• 6 small white potatoes, halved
• chicken broth and water, enough to cover all of this in a pot not much larger than the ingredients themselves.

Put everything in the pot over medium-high heat and bring towards a boil. Just before rolling boil, cut the heat to low and simmer gently for 45-60 minutes until the chicken has reached safe temperature (165-170 in the thigh, I believe - FDA guidelines)

Remove the chicken from the pot, draining as much liquid as you can back into the broth. Carve the chicken. Serve slices of the chicken in a bowl with vegetables, a ladle of broth, and coarse salt passed at the table.

[1] - McGee, Harold. On Food And Cooking. New York: Scribner, 2004. p. 474
[2] - Disclaimer; these regional assignments are based on my current understanding, and I really need to go back and brush up on the regions of France, Germany, and Spain before making more declarative statements about the herbs and spices used in each region, so take that all with a grain of salt.
[3] - One year, growing up, we decorated the gingerbread men at Christmas with little silver decorative balls. Then Mom discovered they were inedible. So, we beheaded all of the gingerbread men, and served them in a particularly morbid display at the big annual Christmas Wassail party.

For quick fix meals, stir fry can’t really be beat. A little more prep time to get everything chopped and ready to go in the pot is more than offset by the fast cooking time over high heat. Growing up, "stir fry" meant that Dad pulled out the cast iron dutch oven to cook with and became extremely focused on food while Joseph and I stood at the kitchen doorway like the ballboys at Wimbledon, our only purpose to react whenever Dad said anything (who, at this point, was so focused that he whispered instead of his usual booming self). Fortunately, when you’re making up a stir-fry on the fly there’s nothing to forget so there’s little stress involved.

I did use another boil-in-a-bag instant rice this time. If I had more time or more energy, I would have made the jasmine rice from scratch. As it is, the boil-in-a-bag rice was great for a stir fry like this. It was a little more soft/wet and starchy than I would have liked by itself, but in a stir fry these qualities help hold the whole thing together. Play with this recipe - change up the protein, mix up the vegetables - this is a basic starting ground that can go in many different directions. Next time, for example, I’ll finish with some toasted almond slivers and torn basil…

And I’d be hard pressed to recommend a better breakfast than cold leftover fried rice. Eat and enjoy.

Shrimp and Broccoli Stir Fry (serves 4-6, or two hungry guys with leftovers for breakfast)

• 1/2 lb mushroom, sliced
• 1/2 - 3/4 lb broccoli florets, cut to bite-size pieces
• 1 lb shrimp, raw, shelled
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 - 4 tbsp grapeseed oil
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 bags Succeed instant jasmine rice

Cook rice per manufacturer instructions. Drain and spread on plate to cool and hold.

Heat oil on high heat until shimmering, about to smoke. Add mushrooms and broccoli. Cook until mushrooms begin to color and give off liquid, 5-10 minutes.

Add shrimp and cook until pink and cooked through, about 3 minutes.

Add rice and soy sauce and heat through. Serve immediately.

My 30th birthday was Saturday, the 5th. As I joked the week before, I figured I was leaving the Roaring Twenties and headed for the Great Depression. Little did I know that my wife, superstar that she is, had organized some surprises for me for the weekend. My best friend from college flew in from Seattle. My brother flew in from Seattle. And my parents drove down from Kentucky. Three times in 36 hours I was floored by these surprises - I’m touched that everybody came in for it. We threw a big part on Saturday night, with more out of town guests (my college roommate came in from Austin, another close friend of ours came in from Austin) and a slew of people in town came out to celebrate in real style, which I’m still recovering from. A big huge Thank You! to everybody for being a part of it.

One gift out of many worth mentioning here that I wanted to highlight was a copy of Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements Of Cooking. I’m about ten pages into it, but that and a quick through has told me that this belongs in any intermediate and above cook’s kitchen. It’s an analog of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, but aimed at cooks instead of writers. Run, don’t walk, and pick a copy of this up - it will improve your cooking.

So, in the spirit of big celebrations, I have more of a story than a recipe this week. I decided back in December that I wanted to try my hand at duck confit. Confit is a preserving technique where meat is salt-cured then slowly cooked in fat until tender, then chilled in the cooking fat. (For a much better definition, see the aforementioned The Elements Of Cooking - I think I’m going to be referring to that a lot on this blog.) The actual confit process is amazingly straightforward and doesn’t require many steps, but does require spacing out those steps over a few days. I left the duck legs to cure in the cooking fat until February or March, I think, and decided to tackle making dinner with them one night when I had the house to myself.

Using duck confit is easy - heat it enough to get the legs out of the encasing fat, heat through on a skillet (it’s already cooked), and go to town. Which I did - making fresh pasta dough from scratch, caramelized onions, and the duck confit to make a homemade ravioli. Really, once the duck is done, the rest is assembly - cook sliced onion in a pot with 1 Tbsp butter per onion until it browns, make pasta dough as below, stuff, cook (I toasted in a skillet, should have boiled briefly first then toasted). Highlights:

• Pasta dough - 100g flour (about half a pound) and 1 egg per portion. Don’t forget to let it rest in the fridge before trying to roll it out.
• I will never roll out pasta dough for ravioli by hand again. Much of my time in the kitchen that night was spent doing pushups on a rolling pin trying to get the pasta dough thin enough. It didn’t work, in the end - the ravioli were still too chewy. Next time, I’m borrowing a pasta machine.
• Warm duck confit is nearly impossible not to devour while cooking.
• Warm duck confit shredded with caramelized onions is even harder to resist while cooking.
• Charge the camera batteries. I have many pictures of this process, which I may edit in at a later date. The picture I’m missing is of the final dish of toasted ravioli with buttered leeks and a red wine sauce - the camera battery died and I had no idea where to find another camera or battery.
• It’s just as well that the camera was out. The ravioli came out too thick and doughy, and the red wine sauce broke while I was scrambling to find a working camera, reducing a deep red delicious sauce to a bitter mix of red wine bits in butter. I pulled out a few tricks to try and save it, or prepare another in record time - and summarily decided that I need to work more on my sauces.

Try making a confit one weekend - it’s actually easy to do, and the results are well worth the time and effort.

Yup. Today’s post is about sidekicks. While the main characters get center stage, these armies of culinary Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns do their part to complete the picture and fill out the experience. Over the past few weeks, while I talk about the main dish, I’ve often photographed finished plates along with sides. These have generated enough noise in comments and emails to me, that it’s time to let the sidekicks have the stage.

(Note: The pedantic among us will certainly have reason to quarrel with my short list above. For example, what about Batman and Oracle? Or Krypto, Supergirl, and Lois Lane? And really - Snapper Carr? Seriously? This is not meant as an exhaustive list but as an illustrative one. Run with it. Think of it as Earth-3, if that makes you feel better.)

Grilled Romaine Salad (serves 2)
First Apperance: Steak au Poivre

• 1 romaine heart
• olive oil
• 2 lemons, juiced
• 1 tbsp shallot, minced
• vegetable oil, to 3:1 oil-acid ratio
• 1 tbsp parmesan cheese, grated
• salt, to taste

Wash the lettuce. Trim the core but do not remove completely. Slice in half lengthwise. Drizzle olive oil over the cut sides and grill, cut side down, until charred and lightly smoking.

Combine lemon juice, vegetable oil, salt, and shallots in cruet or dressing bottle and shake vigorously to combine.

Season the lettuce lightly with salt, dress, and top with grated parmesan cheese.

Carrots Etuvée (serves 2)
First appearance: Poulet en Cocotte

• 8 oz carrots, chopped on bias
• 1 teasp sugar
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 tbsp butter
• 1/2 lemon, juiced
• 1 tbsp parsley, finely chopped

Bring all ingredients except parsley and lemon juice to a boil.

Cook covered about 30 minutes or until tender.

Uncover and reduce any remaining liquid to a glaze.

Toss with parsley and lemon juice and serve.

Note - Adjust water to suit the carrots. Tender, fresh carrots need half as much water; older, tougher carrots may need half again as much.

Cold weather always takes me towards soups, braises, and slow-cooked hearty goodness. However, under major deadlines at work last week, and covering for Christine at the art market over the weekend, I’ve had little or no time to do any real cooking since I’ve been back. That should all change tonight… but that’s for another post.

Many of you (okay, two - statistically many) have asked about the salad in the steak au poivre post below. I’ve got a writeup waiting in the wings on side dishes, but this one is easy. It’s grilled romaine salad. Halve a romaine heart, brush with a bit of olive oil, and grill cut side down until the lettuce begins to char and smoke. Salt, pepper, dress, and top with shredded parmesan.

Today, we go Greek. This isn’t exactly chicken noodle soup, but it’s a bracingly crisp and warming soup nonetheless, equally at home on a cold winter day or on a warm spring afternoon. The flavors are simply chicken and lemon, thickened by the egg and cooked with rice to add some body. This is a tart, almost sour soup, but in a really clean and good way. I’d post pictures, but the last batch came out white - in a white bowl - on a white countertop - you get the idea. This is a quick soup for a weeknight or even a weekday lunch at home. Enjoy.

Avgolemono (serves 4)

• 2 lemons, juiced
• 2 eggs, separated
• 4 cups chicken stock
• 1/2 cup white rice
• salt and pepper, to taste

Boil the rice in chicken stock for about 20 minutes.

Whisk the egg whites to medium peak. Gently whisk egg yolks and lemon juice into egg whites.

Temper egg mixture with hot soup. Whisk egg mixture into soup and return to heat. Cook gently until thick (do NOT boil). Adjust seasonings and serve.

NOTE: We are working with eggs here, and trying very hard not to overcook them. However, it’s worth noting that there is a way to still handle the eggs safely and avoid any risks of uncooked eggs. Harold McGee’s On Food And Cooking, one of the best texts out there for understanding what happens to your foot, notes that if we cook eggs to 140 degrees F for 5 min, or 160 degrees F for 1 minute, we’ll kill any unsavory bacteria in the eggs (page 83). The soup thickens at around 180 degrees, although I do recommend having a candy thermometer on hand if you can to watch the temperature. Regardless, once it thickens and reaches temperature, make sure to hold it for a minute or two so any bacteria are killed.

Time to head home at the end of the week, then. This has been a very useful and full trip work-wise, and a treat to try all sorts of new foods, but it will be nice to be back home with my family, in my home, playing in the kitchen.

This dish, Chicken in a Pot, is a celebration of simplicity. Take a chicken, put it in a covered pot, and cook. That’s all. (Well, basically.) There’s not enough liquid in the pot for braising, but sealing the pot uses more moisture than roasting. The result is a chicken that may not be the prettiest, but the taste is so pure and rich that you can forgive a bit of the look.

The simplicity of this dish means that quality ingredients are most important. I’ve not done it yet, but if this dish were cooked with the standard plump mass-produced chicken available anywhere, the result would be a pretty good chicken. I was able to spend a little more and get a free-range chicken from my local supermarket (Kroger’s), where they get fresh shipments three times a week. It’s worth the little bit extra in cost.

Poulet en Cocotte (serves 4-6)
adapted from Cook’s Illustrated, Jan/Feb 2008

• 1 chicken, 3-4 lbs. Best you can get. Mine came from Maverick Farms via my local Kroger’s
• 1/2 yellow onion, chopped
• 1 rib celery, chopped
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 bay leaf
• salt, to taste
• pepper, to taste
• 1/2 lemon, juiced, optional
• 2 tbsp olive oil

Heat oil in a heavy pot large enough to hold the chicken over medium heat. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees F. Chop vegetables.

Pat the chicken dry and season with salt, pepper.

Brown the chicken, breast side down, about 5 minutes. Add vegetables to the pot around the chicken.

Flip the chicken and brown on the back side, 6-8 minutes, until the veggies begin to brown.

Cover tightly with lid, transfer to the oven, and bake at 250 degrees F for one hour. Larger chickens may take longer - a 3 pound bird will finish in about an hour, a 4 pound bird may need an hour and fifteen minutes, and so forth. Let rest 10-15 minutes. (I’ve used foil in the picture above to make sure the lid fit tightly.)

Optional: Strain the liquid left in the pot, pressing on the vegetables to get all the juice out, and defat. Add lemon juice to taste and pass at table. (A smaller bird may not give enough juice to make this work; use your judgment.)

Note: For safety’s sake, know safe cooking temperatures - I go by the US Food & Drug Administration guidelines. This isn’t a dish where a thermometer can be left in the bird, but err on the side of caution and check just to be safe as the chicken comes out of the oven.