confessions of a double dipper

Yes, some people find it messy, gross, whatever. So I don’t do it at parties, or in polite company, or even in impolite company.  I didn’t double-dip whilst on holiday, which would seem a natural time to engage in food shenanigans.  (I was too busy drinking and getting plowed like highway snow, the memory of which will have to suffice until a friggin eternity  hell freezes over  the second coming of Christ  I give up trying  next vacation.)

I *do* double-dip at home, with alacrity and without a shred of remorse. Yes [back of hand placed delicately to forehead, looking away to the horizon with chagrin], I double-dip my chicken.

So should you.

 

Typically, I bake or roast chicken.  For chicken pieces, a soak in that Korean(ish) marinade for 45 minutes, followed by 45 minutes of covered baking at 325 degrees, then open roasting at 450 degrees for 25 minutes, produces a delightful protein that the kids leave denuded of all but the bone and the cluck.

But sometimes, I like to fry the chicken.  And when I fry, I double-dip.  As a Southerner by heritage if not by birth, soggy fried chicken or breading left in the frying pan are abominations which are not tolerated.  If it doesn’t stick, and it doesn’t crunch, it ain’t fried chicken – that’s just some mess you poached in oil, bless yer heart.

Oddly, I have no measurements.  Just a list of things that I do, which turns out moist, juicy chicken encased in flavorful crunch.  Here goes; hold my beer:

Equipment

• 12-inch frying pan, half-full of vegetable oil and heated on medium-high until the flour sizzles
• two sets of tongs (one for dealing with the raw chicken, one for frying)
• catering pan (enough to hold the marinating chicken)
• small bowl (for the egg dip)
• 8 x 4 loaf pan (for the flour dip)
• aluminum foil, large enough to rest the dipped chicken
• baking sheet lined with paper towels

Marinade (catering pan)

• milk, enough to cover chicken
• vinegar, maybe 1t per cup of milk
• hot sauce, enough to turn the milk pink
• salt, eyeballed…but a 10% solution by weight works

Egg Dip

• 2 eggs, beaten
• shitload of hot sauce (enough to turn the eggs orange)

Flour Dip (all eyeballed)

• self-rising flour (look through my 1-2-3-4 cake recipe, or Google it)
• Old Bay Seasoning
• Salt
• Pepper

Doin’ Stuff

After 2 hours in the marinade at room temp, the chicken is double-dipped, egg dip first.  I let it set up on the sheet of foil for about 10 minutes while the oil heats up, because I want that meat glue/flour mixture to cling to the chicken for dear life.

The fry time will depend on the piece.  I typically fry legs, so 6 minutes per side will get it to the color in the photo.  When in doubt, fry to the color you want, then set it in a 300 degree oven for 10 minutes or so to finish.  The nice thing about that salty, ersatz buttermilk brine is that the chicken will survive the time in the oven without becoming chicken jerky.

dinner rolls and timing

One of the things I’ve determined when churning out dinner rolls to go with a roasted bird is that the optimal time to put the rolls in the oven is as soon as the bird comes out.  The oven temp will be perfect (325, cranking it up to 350 if using a conventional oven), and for a 20-25 minute bake, the rolls can be pulled from the oven, brushed with softened butter and get a few minutes to cool down while the bird is carved.  The timing just works out well.

This also means that the timing of the dough formation, bulk fermentation and bench rise should be calculated against the time the bird comes out of the oven.  Working backwards, then:

My bird will come out at 3:30pm.

90-minute bench rise takes us to 2:00pm.

15 minutes for shaping takes us to 1:45pm.

360-minute bulk fermentation in the fridge takes us to 7:45am. (This is for sanity’s sake; the dough is horrifying to shape at room temp.)

10 minutes with the dough hook on high speed takes us to 7:35am. (It’s done when the dough cleans itself off the bowl.  You won’t think it will.  It will.)

30-minute autolysis takes us to 7:05am.

5 minutes for scaling out the ingredients and giving it a brief stir to combine takes us to 7:00am.

And 60 minutes to get ingredients up to room temp gives us a 6:00am start time.

For dinner rolls.  6:00am.  But so worth it.  (The photo is from two Thanksgivings ago.  I am particularly thankful on this day for Instagram, since I seem to have deleted the photo from my iPad sometime between then and now!)

The Dough (for 12 rolls)

• 450g all-purpose flour
• 4g yeast
• 7g salt
• 48g sugar
• 120g water
• 240g milk (room temp; buttermilk is also delightful)
• 1 egg (room temp)
• 90g butter (room temp); use the remainder of the stick for a post-bake shine

the ten percent solution: brown sugar brine



The Anal Proportion (scale up/down as needed)

• 1000g water
• 75g table salt
• 25g brown sugar

For this bird (12 pound turkey), I mixed 7,500g water with 562g salt and 188g sugar in a garbage bag-lined stock pot (unscented!), dropped the turkey in, closed up the bag and covered the works with a layer of frozen gel packs.  It will brine for 8 hours, get a thorough rinse and pat dry, then come up to room temp.  I’ll rub it down with butter and stuff it with aromatics (onion and sage) before sticking it into The Arsonist at 400 degrees for 60 minutes (breast side down), then 325 degrees for 60 minutes (breast side up).

I don’t have a V-rack.  I have a foil-lined 13″ X 9″ pan with two cooling racks on top.  It does the job.

If you don’t like anal, use:

The Missionary Position (again, scale to suit)

• 1 gallon water
• 1c table salt
• 1/2c brown sugar

cooking when i don’t feel like it: chicken milanese



I suffer from a strange reaction to food – when I cook it, I don’t want to eat it and when I eat it, I don’t want to cook it.  Multi-homed satiety has its benefits and drawbacks.  Tonight was a drawback, since I was full enough from lunch that I didn’t feel like cooking dinner.  But I have two stomachs in the house that don’t cook and therefore expect to be fed regularly.  What do?

Chicken Milanese, that’s what.  It’s fun because I get to play with the food, but not labor-intensive and incorporates downtime, so I can wash the prep dishes during Intermission and don’t feel like the kitchen was hit with a hurricane when I’m done.

beer-oche

Since the last loaf survived drying out in the oven and did not kill me when eaten, I decided to use more of the flat beer to make brioche.  Using Tartine-ish proportions:

this chocolate cake is not a lie

The vast appeal of a boxed cake mix, besides not having to measure dry ingredients, is that it’s a one-bowl operation.  Dry mix goes into the bowl; liquids go into the bowl; presto, cake batter.

I can get that down to a bowl, a bag and a drinking glass, with the advantage of reusing the bag – as soon as one cake’s worth of dry mix is emptied, scale in the next cake’s worth, re-seal the bag and smugly reflect on your water conservation skills and environmental conscientiousness.  Or toss the bag, preferably whilst lighting a contraband legal Cuban cigar with a Ben Franklin and laughing maniacally.

quick tip: separating egg yolks from whites

I Fark every so often, when I’m not busy watching TheRadBrad kill zombies, tending to the brood, cooking, baking, slacking or occasionally putting in a day at the office. For some reason, I visited the video tab. Typically I don’t; the videos that are submitted to Fark are worth watching about 1% of the time.

Today must have been one of the 3.65 days that the video tab has something worth watching, because HOLY SHIT, THIS IS BRILLIANT. I will never separate my eggs Ye Olde Fashioned Way again. [MomMode] Caveat: I do not advocate cracking an egg on the edge of anything. That’s a great way to introduce bacteria into your food. Flat edges, folks, crack eggs on flat edges. [/MomMode]

achievement unlocked: breakdown queen

I enjoy brining and roasting whole birds, but there are times when I want to keep the backbone and wings for stock and I don’t want to roast those parts before boiling them. There are two ways to get to where I want to go:

1) Spatchcock the chicken and separate the wings.

2) Break the chicken down completely. The best video I have seen (both in terms of production value and home replicability) on how to break down a chicken is provided courtesy the New York Times.

yes, chunks of baguette *will* be on the menu tonight

 

Same recipe and method as previously posted, only I gave it a better initial and final shaping (with a 30-minute bench rest) and let it bench proof for two hours before slashing and baking. Since it was going into my baguette pan, I used the Leap of Faith method of baking baguettes in a convection oven.

country bread, nerd style: alton revisited

Having shat upon Chad Robertson’s wet Country Loaf elsewhere in the blog, I began to feel as though I should add balance to this scatological equation. I am no stranger to high-hydration doughs, nor to no-knead doughs. Before reading Tartine Bread, my preferred bread recipe was simply to take Chad-esque ratios of ingredients (with active dry yeast rather than a natural starter); mix them together in a large bowl; let the dough rest, covered, for 12-18 hours on the countertop; then shape and bake the boule. See me go home to my cooking roots and thumb my nose at artisan bread after the jump.