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Welcome to Bouchon in Beverly Hills.
We're very excited to be here with you this morning
for a couple of reasons.
Number one: I get to work with my Chef Rory Herrmann here... Chef.
which is a wonderful pleasure for me,
working on our beautiful Viking ranges and ovens.
So, there are some basic techniques which will help you
become a better cook at home.
One of those is tempering your food.
And what that requires is to take our food out of the refrigerator
with the appropriate amount of time to let it come up to room temperature.
Because if it's at room temperature when we begin cooking it,
it's going to cook more evenly.
So, we rinsed out the cavity, dried it out. We tempered it, we've dried it
We're going to go ahead and season it inside
with an abundant amount of salt and pepper.
One of the things that I want to show you is we want to take the wishbone out.
If we take the wishbone out beforehand,
we have a much cleaner slice when we take it off the bone.
And that's just scraping alongside the wishbone to feel it
then sliding your knife point in there and releasing it from the wing joint.
Very simple. And then running your fingers up
to where that top of that wishbone meets that breastbone
and then just pulling it out.
So, we're going to go ahead and learn how to truss a chicken.
Trussing a chicken is going to enable us to
bring all these parts--the legs, the wings-- all together in a compact package
so that as its roasting, its roasting more evenly.
We're going to go ahead and slide our wingtips underneath the bird to the backbone.
That again is going to help stabilize it when you set it on the vegetable base that we're going to do. Okay.
And then a piece of butcher's twine, very simply,
slide it under the rear here.
Bring it over the two legs, and then back under the two legs
So, what you have there, if you can see that, is a figure eight, okay?
And then we'll just go ahead and pull it together
and you see how that brings those drumsticks in to the side of the breast.
And then, very simply, run that string underneath that wing
around the neck. And you're pulling that flap down
so that the skin becomes a little taut on the *** as well.
And then underneath, I just tie a simple slipknot.
Okay?
And there we have our trussed chicken.
I love my chickens to have a liberal seasoning, or coating, of salt.
So when we're seasoning, again, a basic technique is to make sure
that you're well above what you're seasoning, whatever protein you're seasoning,
so that as the salt falls, it's kind of snowing or raining over the chicken and it's dispersed evenly.
If I did this really close, then I'm concentrating all that in a very close proximity.
I want to bring it up here and just let that salt fall down on the chicken and then coats it nice and evenly.
Again, a very, very basic, but important technique.
And then, I like pepper on my chicken, so we're going to go ahead and put some black pepper,
freshly ground, on top of that as well.
So, again you can see what we've done with our bird
and we're going to add just a couple of pieces of chopped thyme, okay, as well.
Now we're going to go ahead and get our chicken prepared to go in the oven.
We've got a little bit of canola oil in our saute pan.
We're going to go ahead and put our root vegetables in here.
And again, it could be anything you want or nothing at all.
We can just go ahead and ready now with our roasted chicken.
We have some carrots, some onions.
We have some parsnips, some turnips, some leeks, and some celery.
It could be potatoes, mushrooms, anything.
This gives us a nice base for our chicken, but more importantly,
It gives us our vegetables that we're going to eat and enjoy with our chicken after it's roasted.
We're going to put our bird on our bed of vegetables and then
into our beautiful, new Viking oven.
The anticipation of this is wonderful.
Roasted chicken is just one of those dishes that
you kind of crave, right? Absolutely.
You think about that and it comes out. You smell it, the aroma, the way it looks.
Voila! There it is. Our Bouchon Roasted Chicken. There's the chicken.
Kinda makes your mouth water just thinking about it, huh?
So... Oh. We're going to go ahead and take our string off
and you can see how that's... having it tied and-or trussed, as we say,
helps to get that even roasting. Okay?
Remove it.
And then again you'll see why I took that wishbone out.
Let me just go ahead and run my knife right down
and see I don't... I didn't run into...
There's nothing that prohibited me from going all the way down.
And if that wishbone was there, I would hit the wishbone and have to struggle going around it
and we don't want to do that.
Wow.
Look at that. Woo!
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!
You can see why this is one of my favorite dishes.
Ah! Succulent.
Okay.
Some vegetables on the plate.
Perfect.
I favor... A little finishing salt here.
It brings some more flavor into it,
but it also brings texture
You crunch a little piece of salt in your mouth and it kind of just explodes and we love that.
So, how do you think we did?
We can find out. Let me find out.
Just dive into that.
Looks nice and moist.
Great color.
Wonderful aroma.
Crispy skin.
Mmm... Mmm.
Roast chicken.
Roast chicken!
Ah! One of my favorite things right here. The oyster.
The oyster.
Ah.
My brothers would be jealous. (laughter)
Thank you. Thank you, chef.