How To Quickly Roast Chicken

Welcome back to the channel. It is time for another masterclass and today's lesson is all about roasting. One of the core techniques of Chinese cooking, especially in Cantonese cuisine, the sort of Hong Kong style shop windows. The idea is that you kind of pick and choose which one, two or three roast meats you might have with some rice. Lesson one for roasting. The idea is to see how a fast cook, so on a highish heat in the oven, gives us two different finishes on the same piece of chicken. I find that butterflying your whole poultry at home makes it much easier to deal with. It cooks quicker and a fast roast, which is what I'm showing you with the chicken, is really much easier when it's butterflied out or halved. Either way, you're pretty much butterflying your chicken. The other thing to try and get right is like trying to get as even a cook or glaze or crisp edge or skin around every part of your chicken. So there are a couple of different things to think about, I guess, with that. First off, your wings. If I show you the wing, the wings naturally on a chicken sit like that. So if they're kind of tucked over part of the breast, then that part of the breast's skin is going to be masked by your wing. So it won't get that even cook. So you either want to be able to spread those out, but they keep wanting to come back in. So traditionally, you chop those off, use them for a barbecue or some soup or stock, anything like that is fine. Or you can just roast them and have them on the side. That then automatically opens up this part of the breast and exposes that skin to be able to get a more even cook. The other thing that would like as a chicken sitting more naturally or at least trust sort of the French way is that the legs also kind of crisscross over each other on the truss. What I find is, again, those extra bits of skin here don't get the exposure that they want. And if it's wrapped around and roasting the more traditional way, sitting on a tray like that, then you're going to have to turn the chicken to get a more even cook. For purpose of using just one chicken to show you guys different roasting techniques and what they do, I'm going to cut this in half, this butterfly in half, and then it means that each half can just lay down as much as possible to get as much of that skin when it roasts to crisp up somewhat. It's not deep fried chicken, but it's a roast chicken, so it's not going to go crispy, but at least to get a nice even cook. This half I'm going to leave until tomorrow to marinade or glaze with a very, very simple maltose glaze, which I'll show you in a second, a traditional way to get that really lovely sort of deep red colour around the skin. The second half I'm going to now poach and glaze in the maltose solution and then I want to dry it out for as many hours as possible. Overnight I will put it in the fridge because I'm at home and I don't want the flies to get at it. So I'm going to keep this out in front of the fan once I've dealt with it and I'll show you that process now. You blanch your chicken in boiling hot water first and that will tighten up the skin. It will make sure that the chicken plumps up into that more slightly cooked state. This blanching process, three to five minutes of boiling. I don't mind if you need to turn it skin side down either to make sure that the skin really gets the treatment that it needs. And then once you've sealed that chicken all the way around and the outside of the chicken isn't sort of pink then you can take that out. I'm going to get this traditional maltose solution ready and this maltose you can only buy in Chinese supermarkets and it's basically like a really really thick syrup or like honey. It's so hard to get a certain amount of maltose out of one of these tubs. You can just replace it with honey if you wish. Winnie the Pooh would like that. We're going to mix together with a similar amount of red vinegar. You can use red wine vinegar if you wish but you want enough of a solution to be able to then bubble this through and then kind of douse the chicken skin in this bubbling thin syrup. A bit of rice wine, some light soy sauce and a little bit of dark soy sauce to give it a bit more colour. So you get sort of the sour, sweet, salty and mellow sort of more mellow flavour of Shaoxing rice wine. I'm using this as a very very simple sort of almost marinade or glaze technique for your roast to show you the very traditional way of roasting your poultry in Cantonese cooking. So you can see this is boiling, that's good. We'll keep that going for a little bit longer. Dark soy sauce, let's bring that to the boil. Crazy stuff. So that half chicken has been blanched for about five minutes and then I'm just going to place it in the bubbling red hot syrup. These wings may as well do the same, give them the same treatment. And then what you do is you just take that bubbling syrup and you just really just keep dousing it over the skin because you could put the skin side down which I will do in a second just to save a bit of time but the really traditional Chinese way to do this is to not like to get like a perfectly even colour over the skin as it as opposed to like one slightly darker bit another you know is to to do it this way where you're spooning this syrup over the top of your chicken skin or your duck skin but life's too short when you're at home. So I'm going to turn that over and just let that bubble away in that syrup for at least another five minutes if not five to ten minutes and then it will take on some of that colour and then at that point I'll just leave it here on its tray. Let's point the fan towards the tray and then get the fan on top of it and allow that syrup that sticky syrup to dry out on that skin before we then finish it off tomorrow and roast it to that to get that lovely colour around the skin. This half chicken has had about a day of that drying process where I put the fan on it for a couple of hours. Unfortunately, I've broken the skin a little. Hey, doesn't matter, it's a little bit of an experiment so but you can see that the colour of that glaze has kind of really sat on that really nicely and it's kept its shape. It almost looks like it's fully cooked already. It has had about five to ten minutes bubbling away in that glaze before the drying process so it will take less time to cook this on 180 degrees C which I've got the oven fan oven on and then this raw chicken here that's had nothing done to it. As part of the experiment I'm just going to pour this glaze and brush it onto this raw half of the chicken and we'll kind of cook them side by side. I'll take the blanched chicken out probably five or ten minutes earlier than this raw chicken and we'll see what the difference is, you know. It's not to say that one is better than the other, it's more kind of test them and show of like how we like roast your chicken or how you can roast your chicken the Chinese way at home. So well glazed. I'm just going to put the one glaze on it so that it's had a similar sort of a tension, let's say, to the pre-cooked chicken and then I'm going to, you know, if you want to get flavour into every part then brush some of that glaze on the underside as well so that every bit of meat and bone has some flavour to it. Two chickens, the wings I might actually just remove for now. I'll pop them in the last 10 minutes. I'm going to pop these in the oven, see what they do. 30 minutes I reckon for like a total cooking time because it's only half a chicken each and I've essentially butterflied it out to show you that speedier roasting time for when you're using a whole chicken. It's really interesting to see this, the colour difference and how the two halves have sort of held up in different ways. The more western technique of roasting from raw, like the chicken's kind of sat in its position exactly as it was when it was raw so it hasn't, it's not quite as plump, it doesn't sit up as tight. With the pre-blanched chicken, the Chinese roasting technique where you're blanching it, just that blanching process alone has made it sit more upright and that is why we do the blanching. Then it sort of looks more plump, more appealing I guess in that way. Then the colour also is different so the glaze that was bubbled over, it was almost like a second blanch of that syrup, that maltose and red vinegar syrup that I've sort of spooned over and over again onto the skin. The colour on this is much deeper, there's much more char as you can see naturally from that just 30 minutes on a fast roast. Personally, just looking at it without trying it, the Chinese roasting technique is visually more appealing. I'm going to chop through them and show you what they both do. Actually, just even picking up this chicken here, I can feel that the skin is a lot softer, there's more moisture, a lot more moisture in there as opposed to the sort of crisp edge on this glaze from the Chinese style. And yeah, it is cooked through, juices are running through. They should both be, on a fast roasting technique, they should both be very juicy in texture. You can see that just cooked to the bone there which is nice. I'll cut that thigh in half. So, Western roast chicken method, very juicy, 30 minutes was right for that half chicken. Look at that, even though you can see the juices running right through there, even though this has had more time on the cooking process, the combined cooking process, it's retained all the moisture in the chicken meat itself. That is really interesting to see. Those burnt ends as well are great. You only get that from that pre-marinade or that glaze and then drying that glaze, that sticky glaze over the top of the chicken. My analysis on that is that the poaching of the chicken and the meat first has given an immediate seal around the skin and the meat and sort of sealing that moisture inside. And then when you glaze it and dry that glaze, it's almost like another very, very thin layer of glass glaze that has sealed that moisture in even more. I love the fatty bits. Always keep those for yourself if you're cooking it. I'm going to try a little piece of each of the thigh sort of to test out the difference. So, you can see the amount of skin on that on top of the thigh meat there. As I said, there's absolutely nothing wrong with cooking it the simpler, let's say, western roasting method which is from raw. You get a fair amount of flavour in there and it's very juicy, but there is a distinct difference in not just the glaze and the flavour that's on the skin. It shouldn't be a crispy skin, but it's definitely got more of a crunch to it. And my gosh, is the meat on the Chinese roasting technique half, much more juicy. It's amazing what tiny little differences or additions, let's say, to cooking processes can do. This has been a really interesting experiment. Lesson one, fast roasting and a little test between the western way to roast a chicken versus the Chinese way. For lesson two in Chinese roasting, I'm going to use one bit of pork shoulder and you'll see how to go down the slow cook method of roasting different types of pork.