Results tagged “chicken” from Birmingham Mail - Restaurant Spy

One of the biggest cliches in journalism is the intro that begins: "Mystery surrounds..."

But I'm afraid this is a situation in which no other phrase can be used.

A colleague who's taking a cookery course refused to discuss the dish she was meant to prepare last night, saying only: "It was a disaster. It didn't look like everyone else's."

Quite how a plate of chicken and green olives can go so wrong is baffling. What did she do - use crocodile and tennis balls instead?

In the style of any good hack, I shall seek answers.

Smeg is a range of cookers with a high reputation and the sort of name to set some people (me included) sniggering. But right now I'm not smiling.

In the fridge is a magnificent free range chicken which I'd intended to roast for Sunday dinner.

Just across the kitchen is a Smeg cooker, the oven of which has stopped working and which will not be repaired until next week at the earliest.

Roast chicken is best,,,,er...roasted. Right? Wrong.

Try poaching it gently for an hour in stock, drying the flesh, rubbing it with butter, herbs, salt and garlic then giving it a quick blast in a hot oven.

It was a method separately recommended to me by a couple of Brum's finest chefs and worked a treat when I tried it yesterday lunchtime - moist, succulent meat, crisp skin. Perfect poultry.

It's not exactly the ultra-trendy sous-vide method of cookery, but a simpler domestic alternative. And one I'll use whenever I cook chicken in future.