Family Home Style Roast Chicken ( using the 3 stages roasting method)

Hello everyone, Stéphane here from the French Cooking Academy. Today I'm going to try to address a subscriber request as one of you ladies asked me to make a simple family dish based on chicken and perhaps a chicken roast. So I think it was a good idea to have a further look at home cooking in the old days, 1800-1900, see what was the state of home cooking, is there such thing, and when I dig that in my book I actually find a recipe that is called the Poulet Ménagère, that literally translates into the home style family chicken roast. Now how perfect is this for what we want to do. Recipe coming up right now. Now a lot of time I keep on mentioning that I'm using these books, the old books, and a lot of time as well people ask me what are these books, what are you exactly using. So I just wanted to show you in real life what I'm using or some of the things. So this is an example of the old books I get. I get them in electronic format and I get them from the French National Library, it is actually the electronic library. And I found this book that was really interesting called the Cookbook from Jules Gouff. And the particularity of that book is that it's divided the book in two parts. The first one treats only with la cuisine de ménage, which means basically cooking for home cooks or whoever is staying at home. And the second section is la grande cuisine, which is like the restaurant or the professional style of cooking. So that's very interesting because one part of the book is dedicated for just home cooking. So home cooking was already considered as a different thing than the professional cooking. And look at the date of that book, look at this, 1893. That's when it was published. So that's more than a hundred years old. And I have a quick look inside. Now quickly looking inside the book, as you can see here, it's interesting to see these drawings and to see the cookware used at the time. And if you look, they're very, very similar to what we use today. And that was a hundred years ago. Now he starts by making the book and explaining like a whole cooking course about the culinary terms, like all the kitchen jargon you need to know, then about how to set up your kitchen, then about the cookware you need to have in your kitchen and all the other pantry, and even talk about spices and how to set up your tables for guests. So it is really quite a comprehensive guide. Same thing for the cookware. I thought I was going to find some really strange looking things. I mean, look at that. I've got these things at home right now. This is a hundred years old. That's what they were using. Same thing. You got a sieve. Look at this. This is a chinois. You'll find that. It has to flatten the meat and that's for the chicken to pierce or fillet. Look at the knives. Exactly the same. You've got a chef knife, the paring knife. There's nothing really alien to this. The only thing I think that's different is the stove. Let's have a look at that. Wow. So that, my friends, is really a heck of a stove. That's the old fashion. I think this must be like charcoal in there, but really, it's a pretty cool stove. Like these oven sections here, the pantry, and you got all the tools and utensils, even the water. Look at the water on the side. That's pretty cool. But anyway, that's a glimpse of the book. Let's have a look at the recipe in more details. And now for our poulet ménagère. So first off, what on earth is that home style chicken? Well, you'll be surprised that in the recipe, it's actually saying that it is a chicken or roast chicken your way, meaning that there is no real recipe because the recipe varies from home to home. And the only thing that's indicated is how to properly cook the chicken. And when it comes to the garnish, it's basically up to you. So the garnish I've chosen is the one that I've seen so many times in France. And you will find in these rotisserie bars and where you can buy the chicken, it is the simple roast chicken that is cooked with potatoes, onion, garlic, and tomatoes. So you have this roast chicken and the garnish will be served with that. You can have it takeaway. You can make it in one of these traiteurs charcuteries like I've talked about before. It's a beautiful chicken. Simple flavors, but very efficient. Let's see how to make it. As always, food preparation first. This is the action of washing, peeling, and cutting the vegetables. This is actually something that stands in French culinary school books. So for this recipe, we're using potatoes. So you're going to peel, wash, and cut potatoes in quarters like this. These are the waxy type, the Nikola potatoes in Australia. I use whatever is good for roasting. For the onions, they're just cut in half and then sliced, thinly sliced, that kind of size. I've quartered one shallot. I've washed some flat-leaf parsley, thyme, bay leaf. I've got about eight garlic cloves with the sleeve on, and I've just cut the untidy bit on either end. Here, these are Roma tomatoes. You can use cherry tomatoes that we're going to be using afterwards. For the seasoning, very simple, salt, and I've got here a specialty pepper, which is a lemon pepper. Now let's prepare the chicken. To prepare the chicken for a simple chicken roast, that family chicken roast, the first thing is you need to stuff it a little bit, but season it inside. So you raise the chicken like that, and you're going to add some salt. And without putting my hand too much on the camera, and plenty of pepper. So don't be shy. You can put quite a lot in there. It's not going to go too much in the dish. Start with that. Next, we're going to add some flavoring. So that means basically the parsley. Just fold it like that. It's just a matter of filling your chicken with herbs, really. So there's no special way to do it. Start with that. Add some thyme as well, some more flavors. Maybe one or two cloves of garlic. And I'm going to finish with the shallots. Same thing here. Maybe I'll keep two for the dish. I'll just put two inside. All right. Tidy up. And then we're going to try to close our chicken with a string. Now trussing the chicken without a truss, but just with a string. And this is the Jacques Pepin kind of technique, which is pretty good. So you take a very long string that you put under your chicken like that. And what you're going to do first is to wrap this cord around a few times around each leg. So one here, and then here, going to turn around, and then you've got a good grip on those legs. Now you can take your string, and you're going to basically cross the strings like that just below the breast here. And you're going to be able to pull in the back of the chicken, so that's going to be in here. Now at this stage, we're going to turn the chicken around like that and continue the binding. Okay, so I've turned my chicken over, and these are the two strings on the other side. And what I'm going to do, I'm going to go under these wings here and use that as a support to pull one string here. And again, under the wings. And that's giving me this, that kind of criss-cross, sorry, in front of the camera, that kind of criss-cross here of strings. And that you're going to do like this, turn it around like this quite a few times to get this type of shape. So when you pull that, it is not going to slide back, and you're going to be able to really tidy up your chicken as much as you can. When you're there, you can finish the knot, and you're done. You've got a trussed chicken. As you can see here, it's all tidied up, and it will prevent from anything to kind of fall out and it will kind of stay together in a nice shape. Finally, when the chicken has been trussed, the one thing you must not forget to do is to cut the end of the butt here. This is the gland of the chicken. And honestly speaking, you don't want that because there is a very bitter substance in this and it could ruin your dish. So always, I just get rid of it. And now for the technical behind the cooking of a chicken. So first off, the cookware. As you can see here, we're roasting a chicken, so we're using a roasting pan. That makes sense. But the question is actually how do you cook a chicken or how do you roast a chicken? If you go in a French culinary school, there is actually a technique that's been given as the times it takes to cook a chicken and how you should do it. So the time in terms of cooking times, it starts with, this one is 1.4 kilos, and it says that you should be cooking it for 50 to 55 minutes. The important thing to remember when you cook a chicken, what you're going to be mostly cooking are these, the legs, the chicken breasts, and to a lesser extent, the wings. So in French culinary schools, what they tell you is that you need to do that in three different stages. And you always start to roast the chicken, not like that, but like this, on its side. So that the leg here, the bottom, is going to cook first. So it's 15 minutes on one side like that. After 15 minutes, you're going to do the same on the other side, another 15 minutes like that. And that's to make sure the legs, which are the hardest to cook, they're going to be well cooked. And after these 30 minutes, finally, we're going to turn the chicken in that normal position and finish to cook it. So let me put the garnish in and we'll see that in practice. What is that red towel doing there in the background? Well, these are the potatoes because you see, once they are ready, you have to put them in the dry towel and dry them off before you can actually put them raw. You don't have to pre-cook them. This is the beauty of that dish. And we're going to put them all around the chicken. Once your beautiful potatoes are in, it is now time to season the chicken. Good amount of salt. We're going to be using our specialty pepper, which is the lemon infused type of pepper. And then pour over a nice amount of oil to make sure your chicken is nice and oily. To finish, butter. Of course, French cooking, there was a piece of butter in there. Turning the chicken over, try to do that once you've got all the seasoning because I know it's slippery and everything's going to fall off, but try to put it on the side, put some potatoes like that and make sure it kind of stands like that. Once it's on the side, same thing, a bit of seasoning. Same thing on the other side, we've got the legs, a little bit of salt. And now our chicken is ready to go in the oven. So I'm going to start to cook it in the oven at 200 degrees Celsius. I'll put the equivalent and finite on the screen for 15 minutes, one, five. On that side, just after 15 minutes, I will turn it over on the other side. But I'll show you that in more details afterwards. And now, ready to cook. So you put this in the oven on the side for the first 15 minutes. Let's go. After the first 15 minutes, you're going to take your garlic clove like this, you throw them in, make sure you mix the potatoes, and then you're going to do your best to kind of turn the chicken over. It's always a bit of a difficult thing. So just turn it on the other side and bang, back in the oven for 15 minutes. Our second 15 minutes have passed, and as you can see, we start to have a nice color. So this is what you get on the side of the chicken here. And the potatoes as well, as you can see, they start to have that nice, roasty kind of color. And the garlic is really starting to cook. So from here, delicately, we're going to turn our chicken on the normal side, move the garnish, and this is when you're going to be adding all of the onions and the tomatoes. And we're doing this to avoid that the onions and tomatoes are burning. Once the onions are in, it is time to sprinkle some of the tomatoes. Once you've got everything, very gently, you mix all the onions in the juices to make sure they're coated, and we're going to put this back in the oven for another 25 minutes to get that nice, roasty color. And it will be done. 25 minutes have passed, guys. I should have left another 5 minutes for 30 minutes in total to have that brown color. I left this under the grill, and the chicken is ready. This is the home-style family chicken, French version. And I'm doing that recipe all the time, and absolutely love it. So in order to serve it, just put this on the table, and you can start carving and then serve pieces of chicken with that lovely mix that's here. This is what I love. Look at that. This is juicy. Look at this. The juice coming out, natural juices from the chicken, the puree, garlic, the onions melting, and the potatoes, I don't know if you can see here, they can be cut like this, even with a spoon. Look at that. I can carve through. It is perfectly cooked. So the only thing left to do, really, is to gorge yourself with this lovely recipe. So don't hesitate. If you have a chance, get a chicken, do that recipe at home, and give it a go. But that's it, folks. This is the end of the video on the lovely French family chicken. I hope you enjoyed it. If you try the recipe, drop me a comment, as always. If you can support me on Patreon, and to help me make more videos, please do it. And as for me, I will see you next week for another French cooking video, and until then, keep cooking. Bye bye.