How to Make Easy Grilled Whole Chicken and Skillet-Charred Green Beans

[Music] today on america's test kitchen dan makes julia an easy grill roasted whole chicken jack challenges bridget to a taste test of milk chocolate chips lisa reviews specialty gadgets and l makes bridget the perfect skillet chard green beans it's all coming up right here on america's test kitchen [Music] the sum of every great chef can be reduced down to just one recipe roast chicken and today it's dan's turn so julia i will actually argue that grill roasting a chicken is the next level so you're breaking the rules already you're not going to roast it i'm not even going to roast it i'm going out to the grill so the grill is fraught with all these problems when you try to roast the whole chicken and we're not going to spatchcock or butterfly this we're not going to treat it in any special way we're just going to go straight onto the grill with some really simple prep to it so this is kind of the ultimate super simple grill roasted chicken okay so first i have a tablespoon of kosher salt and a half teaspoon of pepper combine that and then i just pat this nice and dry and that looks like a three and a half to four and a half pound broiler chicken that's exactly right yep this is the classic chicken you see at the supermarket and it's going to be perfect here you can do a couple of these if you're serving more awesome so i have a tablespoon of vegetable oil and this is going to serve two purposes one we're going to coat it nicely and it's going to help with browning it's going to you know transfer heat really nicely to the skin it's also going to help all of the salt and pepper stick to it nicely so just rub it in okay now time for seasoning so my mantra is always seasoned high and dry so it doesn't stick to your fingers it gets good distribution and seasoning up high also helps with that it plus it makes you look cool makes you look hot yeah you can do it from like up here ah there we go there we go that's the drama that's the drum okay great so we're not spatchcocking this we're not doing a big breakdown or anything but there are two really important steps that help it cook nice and evenly and the first is putting these wings back here that just protects the wingtips from burning on the grill all right great and then the other thing is we want to get these legs to stay together that's going to give a nice compact shape and the real key to it though is that you actually protect these thin parts of the breast from over cooking this is really thick up here not a lot to worry about but up here it's real thin and it's exposed to the heat when the legs are like that so i have a small piece of twine here and i like to go under on one side over on the other side and then just tie that off and we'll clip the extra string so that bird is prepped and we're almost ready to go out to the grill but we have one more thing to do let me wash my hands real quick so i lied to you a second ago and said that we weren't doing any seasoning beyond what we have on this bird we are doing a little bit more seasoning and it's in the form of smoke oh okay we're not going to use a ton of smoke on their grill we're not making grilled smoked chicken and really really smoky flavor we want to use it like we would any other spice so just a little bit and for that reason we're going to start with a small amount we only have a quarter of a cup of wood chips that's nearly nothing it's a very small amount you're going to get this kind of nice background flavor it's going to taste like it came from the grill instead of the oven but it won't be overly smoky so i'm placing a quarter cup of wood chips in the center of this rectangle of foil here and then i do a business fold so i fold up the bottom third and then the top down over that and then i'm just going to crimp up the edges and we'll have an eight by four and a half inch rectangle now this might seem very particular and it is and there's really good reason for it i'll explain so what we basically want is just one layer of foil on the bottom here so that when this hits the coals it starts to heat up really really quickly so the final thing is we're going to cut two one-inch slits spaced evenly apart air flow is really important with a chip packet so if i took these wood chips and i just throw them on the coals what do they do incinerate they just catch on fire we wouldn't get much smoke that'd be about it so controlling airflow in a chip packet is really really key you want just enough to get in that they start to smolder and that smoke seasons the chicken okay so we'll pop it over here and it's time to head out to the grill all right okay so we've got our beautiful setup over here with seven quarts of coals plenty of heat power here and we're gonna do a really cool setup where we're actually doing a bank on both sides oh so the middle is gonna be empty that's right and so what we're really trying to do is mimic the heat of the oven we want really indirect moderate heat so we can cook this thing really gently and get really juicy results okay great so i've got the banked coals on either side there and then we have our foil packet can be plenty of smoke for what we want all right so now goes our grill grate and we cover with the lid and so we have the vent halfway open on the bottom and we'll keep it halfway open on top as well and what we're looking for now is about five minutes of heating we'll get lots of nice smoke coming out of those chips and the grates will get nice and hot so be easy to clean all right okay so that's been five minutes we've got some nice smoke coming out of our packet there just a few whisks just a few whisks yep so i'm gonna use my scraper here make sure we're nice and clean water paper towels water paper towels we're gonna do a little oiling up always good to do this to your grill every time just before you cook helps keep the grill grates well seasoned so things will stick less okay now it is time for our chicken put it on just like this so the cavity is facing me and we're right in between both banks of coals so this way whenever we render any fat it's not going to drip down onto the coals and cause flare-ups it'll just go right into the bottom of the grill all right brush side up breast side up exactly and so i'm going to put the lid on i'm going to put the vents right over the chicken here and that's going to do a couple of things the first is that we're going to get really even heat if we put it over one of the banks of coals we draw more air we end up getting you know hotter coals on this side so this would be nice and even it's also going to make the smoke kind of pull up this way so we'll get some smoke on the chicken but not too much so we're going to cook this until the breast registers 130 degrees which is about 45 to 55 minutes all right okay so it's been about 50 minutes let's check this guy out it's starting to look good now you can see he's got some smoke on them get a little bit of that nice color there so i'm gonna go in the thickest part of the breast and i'm looking for 130 degrees and that looks perfect 131 well done we'll take it all right so now we're going to do some really nice browning we've got indirect heat to get it really juicy to this point it's a little pale a little pale and that's why we've got these hot coals over here so i'm going to move it over but before i do that i need to make sure i get the juices out of the cavity here we don't they'll come down here crash onto the coals and all that soot and all that we don't want that so i'm just going to go right into the cavity and gently pick it up bring a bowl underneath and just give it a tilt awesome so now i'm just going to put it backside down breast side up right on top you can already hear some of that nice sizzle yeah so i'm going to cover the grill and we're going to cook this for about five minutes until the back is nice and golden brown oh yeah oh i'm starting to smell it now smell it you can hear it and we can do a little peek here you can see we've got some really gorgeous brown in there it looks nice right that's awesome so now we're going to flip it over and get the same thing on the breast side well and also i can see that he's handling the tongs very gently so you're not ripping any of that skin on the breast because you want that to stay intact exactly so that beautiful browning we're going to get on the bottom there as well but another five minutes okay so that's been five minutes some nice searing going on so let's take a look at that that looks good that looks great so we're gonna pop it over here over indirect heat again so we can take its temperature and this time we're looking for 155 degrees we're actually gonna let this rest for 20 minutes and we'll see that we come up past 160. beautiful so we're at 156 all right we are good to go so we're transferred to our carving board here we're going to leave this uncovered so we get that nice crispy skin and we can head in in about 20 minutes we can carve all right okay so this thing looks and smells incredible you get that whiff of smoke right really really nice so this is rested for about 20 minutes we've gained that extra five degrees from that sear that we did at the end there so the only thing left to do now is carve and eat it so i like to go in on the side here first oh my god you can see those juices that look so good i separate between the leg here and the breast and then i just do a little pop make sure i can get that out of there so then once we've separated this out i like to do this right away is to just kind of find that seam it's a little less obvious once it's cooked you can't see that line effect quite as well but it's usually a little bit more towards the drum than you think it is and you just cut right through just going through cartilage and we've got our two thighs and our two drumsticks and then i really like this orientation for taking off the breasts it allows you to kind of follow the curvature of the breastbone a little bit more so the first thing you want to do is find that bone right in the middle and then come just to the left of it and i like to start with kind of the long part of my knife so i'm not digging in too deep gives me a chance to peek and make sure i got it right and i'm just to the left of that bone which is awesome and here it's all about taking your time and so once it starts to come away peeling it back is really really nice move you get to see more in there and the more you can see the easier it is so here i'm following it down peeling back and then you can get down to see this bone right here that's the wing attaches so we're just going to cut through and then i like to make one incision on this side to separate that skin and you've got your breast separated perfectly done so just work on this side as well same way awesome so we come down here see that bone and again i like to come over here and just make that one incision this way and now you've got a nice clean view of your wing bone here so it's very easy to take that off and then you can do an easy split on that as well so you've got your drum and your flat and i like to leave that little tip attached there it didn't burn because we tucked it away extra crispy and then just do nice thick slices on this that skin is where we picked up most of the smoke flavor so you want a lot of that you're going to get the the best effect that way all right now it is time to eat it's coming out a minute too soon come on down here oh that looks perfectly done so if i had to guess you want a drumstick yeah you know me yup but you also want to try the white meat of course i did a couple slices this looks amazing oh it's so good just a handful of ingredients salt pepper oil chicken and wood chips the best smoke yep you can see how juicy it is oh perfect absolutely perfect that little bit of smoke it's just an accent it's by no means overwhelming it's like roasted chicken with just a little bit of something extra special what's really nice is we have good grill flavor overall you know most of the time we cooked indirect which is really good for evenly cooked meat but that little bit of thyme directly over the coals we get all these little tiny flare-ups and that provides a ton of flavor right on the skin itself dan this is absolutely delicious so there you have it if you want to make the ultimate roast chicken rub a three and a half to four and a half pound bird with oil season with salt and pepper and tie the legs together make a two sided fire add a wood chip packet for a little smoke and cook the chicken in the center of the grill for about 45 minutes using tongs carefully drain away any rendered fat and juice from the cavity before browning it on all sides from america's test kitchen to your kitchen a killer new recipe for easy grill roasted whole chicken awesome awesome awesome [Music] there used to be only one chip on the block and that was the semi-sweet chocolate chip but now there's bittersweet and white chocolate versions and milk chocolate so jack's here to tell us which milk chocolate chip we should be using there is a chip for everyone i love it and this is your lucky day because usually i bring you the raw ingredients straight from the package which in this case would be pretty good right true yeah wait a minute but i made it even better i brought you chocolate chip cookies i gotta say i am not unhappy yeah you get two so dig in these are milk chocolate chips so the difference between milk chocolate and the dark chocolates which includes both semi-sweet and bittersweet is that it has more sugar less chocolate and of course it has the milk solids which gives you that creamy buttery luscious texture that we love with milk chocolate so the big thing we thought here was going to be oh sugar notes so the amount of cacao not really these all have about half the cacao which is the chocolate component of a bittersweet chocolate so our favorite bittersweet chip is a 60 cacao chip these are around 30. and so they have a milder chocolate flavor right although you will see some floral notes and some fruity notes that are all coming from the chocolate the biggest difference here was not about flavor but it turned out to be about distribution something is this perfect you have to be picky right yeah the size of the chip which is why i wanted you to taste them in the cookie when we did the plain tasting or we did a pudding tasting where we melted the chips really the differences were pretty much the same none i mean people like them all they're chocolate they're delicious right some of the brands had smaller chips with better distribution in fact i've got a little visual here we counted the number of chips in one cup and our favorite brand you got 394 little chips in one cup 394. and the one with the biggest chips was only 139 and so what happened was you got pieces of the cookie that had a lot of chocolate and then pieces that had no chocolate the brands that had smaller chips you had even distribution so you got chocolate in every bite chocolate even playing field right yeah no we're being picky here these are small differences the big chips don't ruin the cookie but we felt like well given a choice we'd rather have chocolate evenly distributed throughout the cookie in every single bite so you've been eating and drinking i'm going to need at least 20 more minutes alone with these cookies they are all kind of magic i have to say though this might be one of the times that i'm going to disagree with our tasters because i love the little treasure that you find with this one you get some of these bigger chips i wouldn't mind more of them in there if i could make my perfect cookie i'd probably use some of these in some of the smaller ones so i get big pockets and little pockets but i'd say in flavor i'm having a hard time having a real hard time i would still say this is probably my favorite maybe this is my second favorite although i like this darker as well but i'm not sure that that's milk chocolate and i like that one too would you like to see what it is you've chosen or you want to just keep eating let's see what i've chosen how about this one starting off with this one here yeah so you chose the runner-up which is a delicious chocolate guitared but it is a bigger chip which our very picky panel thought you didn't get enough chocolate in every bite but i actually think as a chocolate it's delicious floral fruity it's a really lovely chocolate they're really creamy too and kind of decadent as well all right this was in my seconds between these two i still like them all what am i talking about yeah this is what i grew up with yeah this was actually kind of at the bottom of the rankings if you can put anything at the bottom of the ranks they're all good but it wasn't spectacular and how about this one let's go all the way down here so this is the winner this is from hershey's yeah and we just felt like it had great flavor it had the smallest size so you got the most even bits right throughout your cookie and the last one this is really good too you kind of nailed this when you said it's dark chocolate i thought i'd fool you this is our favorite bittersweet chocolate it's really good it's got twice as much chocolate and half as much sugar now there's a lot of sugar in the cookie itself but it's a for a more sophisticated palette if you want to go back to your childhood you want a milk chocolate chip right right exactly okay so my recipe for chocolate chip cookies one part that chip one part that chip and two parts these chips what do you think so we're having four parts chocolate chip cookies there's no flour in there it's all chocolate that sounds like a great recipe well there you go why don't you go out and buy the winner it's the hershey's kitchens milk chocolate chips it's 329 for a 12 ounce bag i'm taking these with me i never want you to waste your money on gadgets you don't need so even though we tested all these products forget them we're going to tell you what really works first egg cookers they're cute they seem easy and they all made hard-boiled eggs but could you make excellent soft cooked or poached eggs like they promise nope so get this it's our winning steamer basket from oxo all you need is a saucepan and this basket for perfect eggs every time every way now manual food processors they seem great not only were they a ridiculous workout but they couldn't chop anything evenly now look at this now uniform chopping is important if you want food to cook evenly and have the right texture these are really terrible instead get our winning cuisinart elite 4 cup electric mini food processor i have the same onions in here look at this it chops everything perfectly in seconds and you won't even break a sweat finally indoor pizza ovens we tested a bunch of these they have one job and they choked i mean look at the scorch marks on this one it literally smells like an ashtray and it kind of tastes like one too instead you want to use our favorite baking stone by old stone oven and the oven you already have for perfect crispy pizza every time roasting and grilling are great ways to get deep caramelized flavor onto vegetables think broccoli red peppers and even green beans but elle is here to show us a new at least new to us way that might even be the best of all that's right we were inspired by a cooking technique from the szechuan province called dry frying with that you cook the beans twice first deep fried then stir-fry with aromatics then the outsides are blistered until they have nice deep in flavor but we needed a faster way to get to those results so we're starting with a pound of green beans and they just need to be trimmed and it's a pretty quick process this was always one of my jobs when i was a kid me too me too all right so we have a pound of green beans here okay now when we were trying to figure out a way to cook these beans faster we tried just frying them straight up they got tougher and tougher every time it was horrible what we found was that steaming is actually the fastest and best way to go so we're pre-steaming them later on frying yes okay we're gonna steam them in the microwave even better even better even faster yes so first all we have to do is rinse these beans all right that's great so i'm going to go back into the bowl with these beans and we're not going to dry them because we're going to use this extra water for steaming so i'm just going to cover and go in the microwave for six to 12 minutes and they'll need a little tending too so we're going to give it a stir every three minutes okay so it's been six minutes and our beans are steamed they've gotten us halfway to our dry frying process so they're just going to dry off on this paper towel lime plate and they're still green yes they're still green so these are done i'm just going to set them aside and we're going to do something a little different with these beans oh yeah yeah we're going to add panko bread crumbs and we're using panko because they absorb far less oil than standard bread crumbs so i'm going to just put them here in our spice grinder because breaking them up a little bit helps them stick to the beans okay and so we don't want to overdo it we're looking for the texture of couscous so that was two tablespoons of panko a couple of blitzes okay so i'm going to toast these breadcrumbs and a 12-inch non-stick skillet over medium-low heat with one tablespoon of vegetable oil we'll know they're ready when they turn golden brown so it's been about five or so minutes and you know they're ready because they're nice and golden brown it smells like toast in here i know right so i'm just gonna take it off the heat and i'm gonna add three quarter teaspoon kosher salt because panko really doesn't have much flavor on its own it does not needs a little help we have a quarter teaspoon of red pepper flakes and a quarter teaspoon of pepper i'm just going to give it a little bit of a stir that looks great we're going to put this aside and start working on our beans all right it's time to fry these beans yes yes so we have this gnostic skillet over high heat this is the same skillet we use to make our bread crumbs i've added two tablespoons of oil and you'll know it's ready to start cooking when it starts to smoke so it's time to go i'm gonna add these beans in a single layer all right and no stirring that's a really good thing that you dried those off can you imagine if all that water went into that skillet oh it had been frightening so you just make sure that they're all touching the bottom pan a good single layer so it's been four minutes these beans are charred beautifully they're more tender than before so i'm just giving these a final turn another four to five minutes so that they can char all over sounds good all right so how is it that green beans can spend such a long time over high heat and not turn mushy well green bean cell walls contain hemicellulose and pectin and these two compounds help to give green beans their structure now their structure also comes from a polymer called lignin lignin literally means wood like compound so the hemi cellulose the pectin and the lignin all contribute to green beans firmness even after a long stay in a hot skillet all right they're ready to go so i'm just going to get these green beans on the platter but i'm going to leave all of the excess oil in the skillet and you know what else is going to add to the flavor panko we made earlier so i'm just going to sprinkle that on top those are gorgeous unbelievable aroma in here as well let's dig in all right wow they're tender oh yeah deep flavors really really deep roasted almost flavor caramelized on the outside the interior is still nice and firm i love that little bit of crunch it's beautiful a little cake did you get the kick yeah this cake is coming yeah the black pepper and the red pepper one two punch oh yeah well there you go to get unbelievably deep and rich flavor into green beans rinse and then microwave green beans create a crunchy topping by cooking and seasoning panko breadcrumbs sear those green beans in a single layer until they're charred all over transfer them to a serving bowl and then sprinkle with those crumbs so from america's test kitchen to your kitchen skillet charred green beans with crispy breadcrumb topping and you can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season along with tastings testings and select episodes on our website that's americastestkitchen.com what else could you use this with thanks for watching america's test kitchen what'd you think well leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or you can just say hello you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later i'll see you 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Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 49,294

Rating: 4.9377432 out of 5

Keywords: americas test kitchen, cooks illustrated, cooks country, grilling, grilled chicken, green beans, cooking

Id: J6TZ_CpaHlg

Length: 23min 29sec (1409 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021