How to Make Sourdough Bread From Scratch and How to Perfectly Roast a Chicken and Root Vegetables

[Music] today on America's Test Kitchen Julia and Bridget cook a comfort food classic roast chicken with root vegetables and Dan shows Julia a foolproof recipe for making sourdough bread from scratch it's all coming up right here on America's Test Kitchen today we're making roast chicken with root vegetables now roasting a chicken is difficult enough but surround that chicken with vegetables and roast them together well there you have a study in mediocrity mm-hmm and much like the key to a successful marriages separate bathrooms the key to a successful roast chicken and root veg are roasting them separately but don't worry we're gonna add that chicken flavor back to the vegetables at the very end sounds great all right so here is a three and a half to 4 pound chicken first I'm gonna cut some slashes in all the fat pockets to help it render as a roasts and taking a sharp paring knife I'm just gonna make four little slashes right in the fat pockets all right so now we're gonna flip the bird over and we're gonna put the wings back behind its neck that gets him out of the way so the skin is really nice and open for browning as you can see there's some good fat pockets here along the sides and right here on top of the thighs so I'm gonna use a sharp metal skewer I'm just gonna poke it a few times in each of those sort of fatty pockets this will just help that fat render out as the chicken roasts and now I'm gonna turn this chicken around then I'm gonna loosen the skin over the breast and the thighs again that's gonna help that fat render as it roasts so going in from the neck I'm just gonna slide my thumbs in there just loosen the skin there and then run my thumb all the way down over the thighs and the drumstick and I'm gonna go on the other side do the same thing loosened all the skin and now it's time to brine the chicken so we're going to add half a cup of salt to two quarts of water we're also gonna add some sugar this is half a cup of sugar and that both adds flavor and helps the chicken Brown we want to make sure that's dissolved before you mean sort of give it with that salt and sugar is disolved so now we're just gonna submerge our whole chicken right into the brine I'm gonna cover it and we're gonna put it in the refrigerator and let it sit in this brine for about an hour all right so the chicken is out of the brine and it's time to get roasting we're gonna use a combination of root vegetables here carrots parsnips and potatoes the key to getting the vegetables to roast at the same time is putting them into similar sized pieces you cut the carrot in half you leave that side alone and you cut this side in half and now there it is similar size so they can roast at the same time and cut it in half and then we're gonna cut the thick end in half that way so that's 12 ounces of carrots 12 ounces of parsnips and we're gonna add about a pound and a half of Yukon Gold potatoes we're just gonna cut them into 2-inch pieces these are the little guys so all I have to do is cut them in half now we're gonna put them on this rimmed baking sheet that I've already sprayed with vegetable oil spray we're just gonna spread them around make sure the potatoes are cut side down so they get a little brown I put some carrots last but not least the parsnips these vegetables really do tend to dry out in the oven we solved that by simply covering the pan with foil that foil will trap in the steam to dry it out our vegetables ready for the oven okay now moving on to the chicken so I obviously have taken it out of its brine and I'm going to give it a quick pat dry with some paper towels and now we have to season the chicken with some pepper because remember the bryan only has sugar and salt so this is a tablespoon of olive oil and half a teaspoon of ground black pepper and that oil will not only help the pepper stick but it's gonna help the skin get nice and brown as it roasts I'm gonna rub it all over the chicken both front and back we're also gonna tie the legs together because that just helps the chicken hold its shape as it roasts all right they're gonna snip off the ends and was gonna wash my hands before we continue all right so the chickens ready for the oven the vegetables are ready for the oven and in the oven I have a secret waiting it's a skillet it's been heating up for about 15 minutes and the key to a perfectly roasted chicken is a hot skillet now the skillet has very low side so there's a lot of air circulation that can move around the chicken to help Goldin but also by heating it up you're jump-starting the cooking of the dark meat the thighs because that's what takes so longest to cook and she's a hot one so I'm just gonna leave the towel right on the handle so we all remember that's a hot handle I'm gonna add a teaspoon of oil to the pan swirl it around all right and now we're gonna take the chicken and add it right to the pan oh that fear means it's really kind of jumpstart the cooking of the bottom we're gonna put the chicken and the vegetables both in the oven 450 degrees for about half an hour all right so it's been half an hour most chicken though I know it doesn't it smell good all right so I'm just gonna rotate the skillet that helps ensure that the chicken Browns evenly and I'm going to take out the vegetables all right so these vegetables are not fully cooked at this point but I'm gonna take the foil off and let them cool for a few minutes we're gonna finish them in the oven just before serving so it's been about 20 minutes let's take a little look at our bird oh yeah all right so let's take its temperature if you wouldn't mind getting the oven door for me mm-hmm and now again we're looking for an internal temperature in the breasts of about a hundred and sixty degrees now I'm gonna take them out of the skillet and of course I'm just gonna make sure to drain any juices inside the cavity make sure they get right back into that skillet now I'm gonna put them over here on this carving board we're gonna let this chicken rest for about 20 minutes which gives us plenty of time to finish our vegetables with chicken fat Hey thank goodness for chicken fat all right so I'm gonna want to make sure we get up all this browning off the skillet so I'm gonna add quarter cup of water we're just gonna whisk it around make sure you get up all those flavorful bits I'm gonna pour this flavorful juice this liquid gold through a fine mesh strainer into a fat separator we're just gonna let this sit for about five minutes and we'll add it to the vegetables all right so our chicken fat has been separated from the juices now I'm gonna pour off most of the juices reserving three tablespoons of fat for the vegetables using our fat separator there are the juices oh that's the fat starting to be on the top so I'm gonna measure out three tablespoons and the rest of it we're gonna leave with the juices don't worry we're not throwing this liquid gold out I'm not gonna use it right now all right so set these aside for later take these three tablespoons of chicken fat I'm gonna drizzle it over our vegetables I'm also gonna add a little fresh thyme this is a teaspoon of minced fresh thyme a teaspoon of salt and a half a teaspoon of pepper sprinkle that evenly over all these partially roasted vegetables and network's gonna give them a good toss make sure they're all evenly coated with all this chicken fat love now these vegetables need to go flat side down that helps them roast nice and evenly going back in a 500-degree oven on the upper rack for another 20 minutes after 5 minutes I'm going to give them a good stir and after 15 minutes I'm gonna drizzle the rest of the juices over top so they get nice and glazed that is what I'm talking about look at that sizzling and that little bit of schmaltz now those are roasted vegetables beautiful so now I'm just gonna sprinkle these vegetables for the tablespoon of minced fresh parsley onto the chicken just gonna snip off this twine that's holding the legs together first thing I'm gonna do is cut off the legs I'm gonna cut down through that joint and I'm just gonna put my hands underneath and pop out that hip joint and then go right in there to cut the leg away right between this drumstick and this thigh there's a line that you can slide your knife right through last but not least the white meat and we're just gonna slice it right down through the center right next to that bone that breast plate that runs down through the center and then slowly following the curvature of the breast bones I'm just gonna slice that meat away and there we are perfect roast chicken and vegetables now would you like light meat or dark yes resume I'm gonna give you a nice a big piece right here and of course some of these gorgeous vegetables what are you gonna go for first Oh chicken first oh I see I go for the bedrooms even the best for last I love schmaltzy vegetables they're perfectly roasted nice and caramelized that little bit of chicken flavor really just makes them taste amazing I was a little bit skeptical about the skin here because it didn't look very crisp but it's paper-thin and it's so well rendered it's delicious absolutely delicious mmm hooray for Julia and her rave for chicken fat who saved the marriage of roast chicken and vegetables with a few easy steps brine the chicken from moist meat then roast the bird and a skillet from maximum color and lots of flavorful pan drippings meanwhile roast the vegetables separately under foil to kickstart cooking just wilt the vegetables with chicken fat YUM and then return them to the oven until golden and glazed so there you have it from our Test Kitchen to your kitchen the very best most excellent roast chicken with root vegetables lots of chicken fat [Music] sourdough bread is the first type of leavened bread ever made and one of the neatest things about sourdough is that no two loaves will ever taste exactly the same now there's a lot of science happening in this little loaf and that's why Dan's the right person to walk us through the recipe so Julie a lot of people I think are free to make sourdough bread at home right it involves the starter then you have to feed it you can't go on vacation because you take care of it it seems like a huge commitment does we broke it down it's really not as complex as it sounds and once you get into it it's really fun so we're gonna start down here and we're gonna mix up the flour mixture that we're gonna use to start and then feed our dough the entire time gonna start with the starter we're gonna start at the beginning with the starter now a lot of recipes we saw start with just all-purpose flour and you can totally make it work with all-purpose flour but we actually use a combination of all-purpose and whole wheat whole wheat provides more nutrition for the yeast and the bacteria that live inside the starter so it actually comes to life a little bit faster and we get more robust growth and better flavor so I've got 25 ounces of all-purpose flour and then 24 and 3/4 ounces of whole wheat flour now I noticed you're talking in ounces not cups and that's because we're making bread and when you make bread especially a sourdough like this you want to measure everything in ounces because it's far more accurate to begin our starter we have five and a third ounces of water in this bowl and I'm gonna add five ounces of our mix here so I'm just gonna use a wooden spoon to stir it together what's fast thinking about sourdough is that everything we need is already in this bowl with the starter and this is why different sourdough breads from different regions will taste different because there's different types of bacteria in the air that then give the sourdough its flavor it's like the ultimate local food right okay so that's perfect I'm gonna cover this with plastic and this step in the process or it's really starting and really coming to life it takes anywhere from 48 to 72 hours okay so that's the starter but what about the rest of that flour so that's actually gonna come with us right over here so this is a three day old starter oh it looks much different don't you give that smell oh it smells almost like beer mm-hmm really boozy oh really boozy and a little funky right like not necessarily all good no not good beer not good beer yeah a little bit funky so the yeast he's probably giving you a lot of the alcohols that you're getting and that's reminding you of beer but the bacteria is what's giving it that kind of edge and that funk so that's a really healthy looking three day old starter all right so now the next process is feeding it and this is where there's so much folklore around what you need to do take it on an airplane with you so you're a babysitter hire a babysitter for I've heard of that so right now while we're trying to get this to a really healthy state that we can bake with it's gonna require a bit more attention every 24 hours we're gonna do something - every day every day at the same time really easy to remember right in the morning or in the evening once it's established and really healthy and we can bake with it then we want to store it it's really every week that we need to do something with it okay how long does it take to get to that stage so it's gonna take 10 to 14 days of this feeding so the feeding process is really simple I have two ounces of water here and to that I'm gonna add 2 ounces of this starter all right that's great now this you don't need any more and what I like really yeah what I like to do is actually give it to a friend oh it's like sourdough club you know start spreading it around okay and I'm actually gonna add in two and a half ounces of our flour mixture okay and again stir it until there's no dry flour remaining all right so this is what the first feeding would look like exactly so every feeding you're gonna do the exact same thing so we're gonna do that for 10 to 14 days until it's basically really really lively and in an 8 to 12 hour period it doubles in volume okay that's what your indicator that it's ready to go a little more plastic on top this right here is a mature ready to go starter this is ready to bake with this is about 14 days old we did that process every day it's in there it's in there you know that liquidy started that you had before this is a real solid sort of thing yeah it's really robust you can see how small the amount I have there is how much it's grown that's exactly what we want really bubbly and it smells good this doesn't smell quite as fun oh that does smell good that smells like good beer good beer let's go good so now it's time to mix up our bread you can make a lot of different breads with sourdough it's not just one style we really like doing it with an almost no need method so we're starting with three ounces of our starter that is really healthy next up I'm gonna add our water so this is 12 and 2/3 ounces of water okay it's at room temperature we're gonna do our from a tea at room temperature so that's perfect I like to add the water first to the starter and loosen it up and makes it a lot more easy to incorporate everything in yeah I was wondering how you're gonna get that sort of sticky lump of dough evenly mixed into the flour because we're not using a high speed processor or a stand mixer it's a lot easier this way so just add my water in your most dissolving it exactly yep break it up at the whisk okay so now it's time for our flour we're using King Arthur all-purpose flour it's an all-purpose flour that has a little bit higher protein than most if you can't find it you can substitute a regular bread flour for it but we like this it's a bit more tender loaf so I have 18 in 2/3 ounces and I have one and 3/4 teaspoons of salt here just gonna whisk this in here flour mixture into our starter and water mixture well I like that this is just a bowl mixing method no need to drag out the stand mixer no it's really nice going back to basics mm-hmm so again I'm just gonna stir this until there's no dry pockets of flour I really like a wooden spoon for this it works pretty well mm-hmm if you bake a lot higher don't you do if you bake a lot it makes sense it's much nicer and easier to kind of incorporate all the ingredients we have a baker in-house that just absolutely loves using this thing so I've kind of taken to it over time ok so that's great I'm gonna switch from my dough whisk here to my hands we're gonna need this not a lot but just gonna get it to come together a bit more yeah it looks pretty shaggy right now yep and Shaggy is okay looks good I'm gonna cover this with plastic wrap and it's gonna sit at room temperature for at least 12 hours and up to 18 hours all right how do you know it's time to make bread it's gonna be about double in volume alright that's pretty easy okay so we have our 18 hour risen dough here it's beautiful beautiful right I'm gonna get this set up over here for our Dutch oven which we're gonna bake in this is a 12 by 12 sheet of parchment I'm just gonna spray it little cooking spray I'm gonna lightly flour this counter this is where we're gonna do our work don't want too much it's okay if it sticks a little bit we can always add more and I like to dip my bowl scraper get a little flour on there too and use that to pull it out I love seeing all the big bubbles on the bottom of the ball when you pull out a freshly risen dough it's so satisfying it's really satisfying all right so I'll set that aside now this is an almost no need dough so we are gonna do a little bit in eating dust with a little flour on top oh that don't look soft so I'm just doing 10 to 15 times here not very much at all looks good looks perfect I pull some of this in here so we get a little tighter top flip it over and I like to just do a little of this action roll it around I'm pulling the bottom in mm-hmm and that's gonna tighten that skin just a bit more looks good so just go like this transfer over to our parchment so that's perfect now transfer it to our Dutch oven this is one of the coolest parts of this recipe so we found years ago that baking in a Dutch oven is really great for bread it's basically shrinking your oven to this really small size so if this gets really hot it traps all that steam in there and those French ovens that are steam injected that's gonna get that crispy really crackly crust on there so this kind of simulates it in a very simple way but what's unique is that we're actually not going to preheat this so we're gonna do our first rise in this so I've got plastic wrap here just cover this nice and tightly so the natural yeast and the sourdough starter is what gives this dough rise right it works really well great flavor it's a little bit slower than using commercial yeast it just doesn't catalyze it as fast so what we need to do is warm up the temperature a little bit this dough is gonna go on the middle rack now I want to point out this oven is off right it is not even warm not even warm has never been turned on well not today anyway so when we pulled this out and you can see that I've got a loaf pan here right and we have three cups of boiling water here have you pour that in there we go great and we'll close it right up that hot water is actually gonna make the oven about 95 degrees really nice and humid and it'll stay that way so the yeast is gonna work a lot faster so that rise is gonna take two to three hours and we're looking for the loaf to not push back too much when we put our thumb into it it's been three hours we're gonna check out our dough and if you wouldn't mind grabbing the water pan out we don't want that in for the actual I'm gonna take the plastic wrap off and we're gonna check to make sure it's gotten a lot bigger look how pretty that looks great smells good mm-hmm that's awesome so it's kind of a lot bigger our real test is we're gonna put our finger in push a little bit and we don't want it to really spring back forever right so we're gonna look here so that's perfect so I'm gonna dust the top of this loaf with just a little bit of flour which is really beautiful once it bakes on there huh bread should be beautiful that's great now I'm gonna score the loaf now this obviously looks beautiful it's where the loaf will expand and crack but it also serves an important function if we don't do that we get blow it's and odd places and it's not very pretty so I'm gonna make a 7-inch score about a half-inch deep across the top here you can see it start to expand a little bit Oh would I do that my neck step is I'm gonna cover this and this is gonna go into a cold oven really yeah what's really fascinating about this process is everything kind of happens in slow motion normally we'd have to drop this into a really hot Dutch oven that's all preheated trying to move it back into the oven this way all that steam is trapped in there and the dough heats up along with the oven so you're this really awesome oven spring when I'm pop the lid on we're going to go into that cold oven and we'll turn the heat to 425 degrees bake for 30 minutes then remove the lid and bake for another 20 to 30 minutes okay so it's been another no better smell in the world then freshly baked bread it looks beautiful we're gonna take a temperature we're looking for 210 degrees to tell us that it's done so this nice parchment sling that we have in here makes it really easy to transfer it out of the Dutch oven and over there if the dough doesn't stick to the bottom doesn't stick to the pot gives you a nice little handle pop it over here and slide it off look at that so here we have a loaf of bread that we didn't slash before baking and if you can see that little crack that steam inside the bread is gonna find a way out one way or the other and it makes this really uneven crack that makes it hard to slice the bread but when you slash the dough before baking you give it the perfect place for the steam dries and make it a nice taller for bread and it's got to be pretty ready we went through all this work is beautiful this way we're gonna let this cool we can't dig into it quite yet you gotta let it cool down or it's gonna be a little gummy inside that's gonna take about two hours and then we can slice in it sounds good it's time to slice it up it's nice and cool at this point oh that sounds pretty good listen to that and here it looks like we have some salted softened butter I'll just do a little bit thank you oh it smells so good that's awesome mm-hmm sometimes when you buy sourdough at this store it almost tastes like vinegar like they baked it but this is really delicate and almost floral this is totally authentic flavor really really awesome I think you said no two loaves tastes the same so this is a really unique experience to have just this one right here the Dan loaf mm-hmm to make an authentic sourdough bread at home start with a starter each is one of a kind as it matures in your kitchen let the shapes loaf sit above a pan of steaming water and it turned off oven to ensure that arises high without drying out finally bake the bread and a heavy bottom to Dutch oven until it's deep and golden-brown and there you have it a traditional foolproof recipe for the best sourdough bread you can get this recipe all the recipes from this season along with our tastings testing and selected episodes on our website America's Test Kitchen calm thanks for watching America's Test Kitchen what you think we'll 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 later

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 553,507

Rating: 4.8721318 out of 5

Keywords: americas test kitchen, cooking, cooking show, how to, public television, cooking video, sourdough bread, sourdough starter, how to make sourdough bread, how to bake bread, homemade bread, how to make a sourdough starter, how to maintain a sourdough starter, how to roast a chicken, the best way to roast a chicken, roasted chicken, roast chicken, how to roast root vegetables, roasted root vegetables

Id: AyUNtvj6KmE

Length: 22min 16sec (1336 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 26 2018