How to Make the Crispiest, Juiciest Chicken with Mandy Lee | At Home With Us

that is the level of crispiness my friend and trust me you can't get this from roast chicken hi um mandy again from lady and pups um today i'm with fu52 to bring you probably one of my favorite chicken dishes to make and i call it flattening the bird typically what the favorite thing that people like to do to a chicken is to season it and then as a whole just stick it in the oven and you know it's called the roast chicken and but in my mind the pro the issue with roast chicken is what exactly are you after so number one thing crispy skin number two juicy meat none of those things can be easily achieved in roast chicken recipes because as you can see a chicken is a very three-dimensional object okay so when you stick it in the oven it's very very it has all these nooks and crannies these corners and folds it's very hard for the oven to distribute even heat all around the chicken typically you get like a kind of a overly browned breast skin and then whereas like the skin on the bottom is still kind of a soggy and still still wet what i'm proposing is we basically what we're gonna do is turn this three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional sheet okay so you're gonna turn this chicken into a sheet and then it's going to cook slowly instead of it in an oven on a skillet and you're going to be blown away by how much more amazing the result is compared to a roast chicken the first thing i usually do to a chicken is i take off the um wishbone [Music] and there you go very easy okay so the wishbone is gone okay so now what i do is i will remove the wingtip and then brush side up i'm going to use my scissor first to basically cut through the skin split this breast open and you see that if i hadn't removed the wishbone i'm going to run into it right now and it just annoys the hell out of me every single time you can see like the chicken doesn't want to open yet because the bone is still kind of holding it into shape so what we're going to do now is we're going to bend this leg until you hear a crack you're basically trying to disconnect the side bone with the backbone here okay now see much flatter okay but we're gonna go even further than that okay so the goal here is to basically disconnect every joint in this bird so that it it has no nothing to hold itself in shape anymore so number one thing we're gonna do and it really you don't have to follow the sequence here you know like you can do it however you see fit but you know typically what i like to do is um i go for the wing here where it joins with the breast [Music] [Music] you can see that step by step is getting much much flatter as we go okay but now you can see that the leg here is still a 3d object so i still like folding it like this and this part of the skin is not going to be in contact with the skillet so what we're gonna do is like i said we're gonna dismantle every joint that's holding the bird together so i'm gonna feel where the drumstick bone is connecting to the thigh bone which is right here and i'm going to give it a score and that will sever it very easily okay and now i'm going to open this drum stick up [Music] try to give it a very clean score right against the bone where the meat and the bone touches instead of like slashing everywhere because you want the meat still you you still want the meat to be intact right so now you can see how this part is completely flattened up right is completely flat okay so i'm just gonna do the same thing here [Music] so now it's a super flappy flattened bird okay it's not that hard and then there's a pel usually typically i don't you don't have to do this but i like to remove this pelvic bone here you can see the skin side is going to be where it touches the skillet right so you want every inch of skin to be able to completely be in in contact with the skillet so now you can see that i'm noticing that because like this part here is laying on top of the wing and it's not going to be able to fully touch the skillet so here i'm going to release that and then there this part used to be over the wing so it cannot touch a skillet but now just give it a score and you you just basically release it from from that attachment and now it's completely flat there you go okay now it's completely and utterly flat and you can see it doesn't really take up a lot of time at all i promise you that once you've done this once or twice you'll get the hang of it and it's going to be so much easier um and unintimidating put a meat side up first on a flat skillet like this because we're gonna season the meat side first and here i have two and a half teaspoons of sea salt and one teaspoon of white pepper if you only have black pepper that's fine too but i like white pepper um actually i will urge you to urge you to try white pepper i just think it pairs um much better with chicken so sprinkle half of that on the meat side try to be as even as you possibly can we don't want what we don't want is like a mouthful of salt when you eat it so there so i put half of the seasoning on the meat side and now i'm gonna flip it and i'm going to season the skin side you know there are a lot of folds here so try to lay it as flat and spread out as you possibly can my my sheet is a little bit small smaller um so ideally you want to use a sheet where the chicken can completely spread out but you know it's it's fine okay and i'm gonna put the salt on the skin side as well again try to be as even as possible the next step i feel like is a very crucial step that most people miss out whether you're roasting chicken or doing it this way or not it doesn't matter number one rule that you need to remember is dry skin equals crispy skin because why because moisture is the enemy of crispiness we all know that so a lot of recipes don't either they don't notice or they fail to mention it is that you always want to dry the skin up before you cook them because that is going to significantly increase the crispiness of the skin so what i like to do is i like to leave the chicken in the pan like this uncovered and then i stick um the chicken in the fridge for i'm gonna say ideally two hours at least okay two hours up to like six hours but if you don't have time try to at least give it one hour in the fridge because the fridge is going to draw out all the moisture from the chicken skin and it's going to really really really help you trust me achieve that crackling like chicken skin that we're all after right so put in the fridge it's going to be super dry and you're going to be amazed so the chicken had been drying in the fridge for about two hours and when you take it out um you're gonna notice that the salt on the skin it's gonna draw out the moisture from the chicken and if you haven't left it in the fridge for long enough those moisture are going to be still on the skin so just take a paper towel and just really thoroughly let it dry okay if you have left your chicken in the fridge for six hours or so um it will come out really dry those excess moisture um would have would have evaporated already but um typically two hours um you will still see a little bit of moisture just hanging around on the skin so just use a paper towel weld it really really really dry okay bone dry so once you've done that you're gonna need a really big non-stick skillet non-stick okay i can't stress this enough i mean i've had people ask me like oh can i use my grandma's cast iron or you know blah blah blah okay you can use anything as long as it doesn't stick not even a little bit okay so my skillet is about 30 centimeter in diameter so you want a skillet this is the minimal um the smallest size of a skillet that you can go okay because any smaller the chicken is not going to have room to spread out then what is the point right so what we're going to do is cold skillet start with cold cocoa skillet we're going to transfer the chicken onto the skillet skin side down and then you're going to take a little bit of time to really make sure the chicken is laying flat and spread out you don't want any fold of the skin that's being tucked underneath you know stretch it out as as flat as possible i'm using a tongs because i don't want to wash my hands again but you can use your hands if you only have a one ring burner aim for medium low heat okay but um it's ideal that you use a two ring burner because the heat is more even then you're going to put um a lid that is only half covering it partially okay you don't want the lid to completely cover the skillet because why the steam is going to collect in the skillet and what is um what is moisture the enemy of crispiness right so we don't want any moisture to be collected inside the skillet this is purely for preventing splatters let's talk a little bit about why cold skillet with the cold skillet they're kind of slowly raising the heat so that all the moisture can be drawn out before the browning starts okay does that make sense so it's been about like seven eight minutes and you can see that a lot a lot of chicken fat has been rendered out from the skin and that's exactly what you want and see if you want to see that explosion right there that's why you want the partial lid to um well protect yourself and also the kitchen so sometimes what i do is if my skillet it's not super big that the bird is completely spread out um i like to tilt the skillet just like this so that it can cover all the parts that is not that are not touching the bottom of the skillet and 10 minutes in you would have had enough chicken fat in the skillet to do that you're kind of now really frying the chicken in its own fat and meanwhile i've prepared cloves of crushed garlic and a good small handful of fresh thyme in my mortar you can use any herbs you like but really garlic and thyme is just it can't go wrong with that now it's about 30 minutes in and i'm ready to flip the birds and you can see this is when um the last before i before i flip it that's when i put in the garlic in the time [Music] and you want the time to pop like that okay that's how it releases um the fragrance and then once the oil is seasoned i'm going to flip the burst [Music] now the beauty of this recipe is that when you're ready once the skin is ready the meat side has been slowly cooked and almost done this too so when you once you flip the bird you really only just need two more minutes to bring it to the finishing line and now i have turned off the heat already and please please please do not flip the bird before the skin looks like this that is the level of crispiness my friend that you want and trust me you can't get this from roast chicken you see how the breast meat is still really really moist compared to well the roast chicken is more like cardboardy kind of like powdery texture it's still really really tender and juicy i'm gonna start with the thigh because that's my favorite part seriously i don't know if you can hear that no roast chicken will sound like that i i promise you [Music] salty super concentrated chickeny-ness it's almost like the chicken is fried which it kind of actually is it's kind of fried it in its own fat but when you get a skin when you get the chicken skin skin too crisp up excuse me don't top with my mouth though when you get the chicken skin to crisp up to this extent the intensity is incomparable to skin that is still semi moist semi-soft um not completely fully dried up it just tastes completely it's not even the same animal so there this is my favorite chicken recipe and i can't tell you without you trying it i can't i just can't tell you how much better it is than just a typical roast chicken and once you try it once or twice you're going to realize it's really really not that hard it's quite easy to do and the cooking process is quite a cinch and yeah so i hope you like it and give it a try let me know what you think and i hope to see you next time

Channel: Food52

Views: 829,944

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, mandy lee, mandy lee lady and pups, lady & pups, crispy chicken, juicy chicken, pan frying chicken, flatten chicken, how to flatten chicken, dry brining, easy chicken recipe, flatten the bird, whole chicken recipe, how to cook a whole chicken

Id: fnwQDvtJ5zw

Length: 20min 2sec (1202 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020