Crispy Skin Isn't the End Game of Roast Chicken
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had the same answer to the age-old question “What do you want as your last meal on earth?”: It starts with ice-cold briny oysters and sweet shrimp cocktail, moves on to the world’s greatest cae sal, and finishes with a roast chicken, as classic as they come, with some crusty bread and butter alongside it. And until several weeks ago, when I dreamt up that roast chicken, it looked exactly like the roast chicken I’ve been making my whole life: A beautifully burnished, platonic ideal of a roast chicken, simply seasoned and cooked at 425° for 45 minutes or so, ensuring that incredibly addictive crispy skin.
But then this Slow-Roast Gochujang Chicken entered my life and changed everything— I’m not exaggerating when I say that it has me rethinking my plans for my final meal. A different kind of roast chicken, it’s cooked low and slow instead of hot and fast. But it’s worth investing the time because what emerges from the oven is lightyears greater than the sum of its parts.
And about those parts. First, there’s the absurdly simple glaze. All you have to do is whisk together a few tablespoons of gochujang and olive oil with some grated garlic and ginger. Full stop. Basta. C’est tout! The spicy, crimson-red mixture then gets brushed generously over the chicken and nestled into a cast-iron skillet on top of the second part: a few pounds of baby Yukon Gold potatoes.
The whole set-up is cooked at 300° to make magic happen—and, I’m telling you, magic happens. Two and a half hours later, a lacquered, rust-colored bird appears, with meat so tender that you barely need a knife to carve it. Beneath it, the perfectly tender potatoes, which have confited in its spicy, schmaltzy drippings.
This is a bird that eats more like a rotisserie chicken than a roast chicken. The low temperature gently cooks the meat so that neither the leg nor the breast suffers in service of the other. And what it lacks in crispy skin, it makes up for in fall-apart tender meat. Take it from a crispy skin fanatic: You won’t miss it. The sticky, spicy deeply flavorful glaze more than makes up for it.
If I haven’t already convinced you of the epic proportion of this chicken, rest assured that it requires no more effort than any other roast chicken recipe you may have made in the past. The only additional ingredient you’ll need to reach roast chicken nirvana is time. And surely you can find some of that in the name of trying a dish that’s worthy of being your last.
Get the recipe:
Slow-Roast Gochujang Chicken
Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit
