Well, you could just roast it...

  The management seems to have taken a liking to my Sunday roasts, which is nice. It's especially nice because I'm quite partial to a bit of a roast too and it gives me plenty of opportunity to practice and hone my craft. If you decide read on I'll tell you the story of today's delicious little experiment.

  Still here? Excellent. My favourite method of roasting chicken is to put it, covered with foil, in a roasting dish, on a stack of vegetables, all swimming in white wine and water. I roast it at a low temperature for ages so it steams and softens, then at the end, I crank up the temperature to volcanic, remove the foil and let the bird get nice and crispy. Today I went for a slight variation.

  A coq au vin is basically a chicken boiled in wine. I thought that would be a good place to start so I filled half a casserole with veg, plonked a chicken on top, poured in loads of wine and some water and put the lid on. I simmered this for three hours until I had something between coq au vin and chicken stock. The chicken was moist and falling off the bone and I had a load of rich stock which could get used in all sorts of scrumptious ways. You can see the before and after pictures above.

  To get the chicken crispy, I had thought of putting the casserole in the oven but as the bird had sunk into it's juice bath, I opted instead to put the chicken in the tray with the roast spuds. As the chicken had all the structural integrity of a sponge cake that had been left in a monsoon, I was a bit of a palaver, but I managed. Phew!

  Above you can see the end result. What's harder to see is the gravy made from the stock, the stock enriched glaze on the carrots and that the green beans were boiled in the stock. Though it was a thoroughly filling feast we had a lovely dessert of chocolate cake in gravy, pears poached in stock with two scoops of stock flavoured ice cream. (That's quite enough stock jokes. -Ed.).

  As interesting an experiment as it was, my advice is that it was a lot of extra faffing to achieve almost the same result. What I did take away was that in future I'll use a deeper roasting tray with more veg and the foil cover as before, but I'll make sure to give the chicken the full three hours in the steam, so it's absolutely melted.

Happy experimenting.

Kirk out

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