Winner, Winner, (Butterflied) Chicken Dinner
How removing the spine of the chicken opens up roasting the bird to a new world of tenderness and flavor.
My wife makes roast chicken between once and twice a month. It’s a classic dish that our kids love, but it can be prohibitive to make. The pandemic has given her time enough to make it during a workday because she can work from home. Without that time buffer though, I’m not sure it would be feasible to make it with the same frequency. Roasting a chicken traditionally takes hours. Over the eons, people have developed a method that has quickened the time it takes for the bird to go from raw to wow. Removing the chicken’s spine and cracking the breastbone allows one to lay the chicken out flat on a cooking surface. It exposes all edible surfaces to direct heat rather than the thighs being tucked away within the cavity. The method is called spatchcocking.
The word spatchcock has appeared in texts going back hundreds of years, and it’s easy to see why such a method would catch on. Getting a roasted or smoked chicken in half the time or a whole chicken to roast on the grill is such a cheat code. Additionally, spatchcocking has a reputation of having crispier skin and juicier meat than traditional roasting. I guess the drawbacks are that it takes extra work to butcher the chicken, and you can’t do things like stuff the bird. Everyone loves a good stuffing. But food is all about push and pull, get and give. You try different things and different methods and choose which ones you like the most.
I’ve taken to trying to make dinner once a week, usually on Sundays when we don’t have plans as a family, and a chicken dinner is as emblematic of Sunday dinner as anything. After watching a bunch of videos of people making spatchcocked chicken for technique, I tried my hand at it. Again, Amanda makes chicken the traditional way. I don’t want to try to outdo her because it would be like asking Roman Quinn to beat Aaron Judge in a home run derby. I had to try something different, and spatchcocking the chicken seemed like something I could do. Here’s how I did it.
The key to a spatchcocked chicken is starting the process hours before you cook. You need time for seasonings to take hold, but before you season, you have to prep the bird. First, I took the chicken out of the packaging and patted it dry. This step is strangely important, because water gets in the way of having a crispy skin. The thing that makes meat “moist” anyway isn’t water, it’s fat. Keep that in your back pocket. Take paper towels and pat the chicken down as dry as you can. A good tip for when you have time is to salt cure it overnight. The salt will cause water to osmose from the meat and the skin, which will allow the direct heat and the fats to do the heavy lifting cooking and not the water through steaming. I didn’t do this because as of Saturday night I was still undecided on whether I was making the chicken. But it’s a method that other cooks who know a lot more than I do employ.
The next step is the actual spatchcocking. Removing the spine is the first step of this, and it’s actually not as hard one might think it is. It’s actual butchering, but you’re going to be cutting through brittle rib bones. If you have pastry shears, this step is easy. If you don’t, it’s still easy, but you gotta put some elbow grease into it. As long as you have a sharp knife, you should be able to get that spine out of there. Once you’ve removed the spine, you can and probably should save it for later use in making stock. Everyone loves chicken stock. The second step is cracking that breastbone, which is even easier than removing the spine. You can use a knife or another blunt object with minimal force to press down and crack that bone. If you want to flex and show off your muscles, break it by hand. Just make sure no matter what, you’re washing your hands at each step and not cross-contaminating. Chicken is the raw meat that is going to give you the most problems with cross contamination.
The next part is seasoning, which again, is something you should do hours before cooking. I started prepping at noon for a 4:30 cook time, which is fine. Some people say an hour works. Honestly, when I do it again, I may opt for an overnight marinade/brine. Anyway, the first seasoning method is something you can, and should, do with a traditional roast. Get your hands between the skin and the meat and break the membrane. It’s easier to do this on the thighs and legs with the bird butterflied, but it’s a must with the breasts regardless. You want to put a good, flavored fat under the skin. I recommend a compound butter. Take a stick of butter out of the refrigerator a few hours before you plan on prepping the bird so it gets nice and pliable. Then place the butter in a bowl and season with what you want your chicken to taste like. I used salted butter, but if you have unsalted, the first ingredient should be, of course, salt. I used pepper and garlic powder in mine, but rosemary, thyme, lemon pepper, or straight up lemon juice and zest are all poultry-friendly seasonings. This process is called making a compound butter, and you can get as simple or fancy with it as possible. Mash the seasonings into the butter until they’re all spread uniformly, then take a knob of that butter, lift up the skin, and get it all spread onto the meat. It’s not important that it’s completely uniform because it’ll start melting right away, but you don’t want to have it so uneven that you create a topographical profile. After you’ve gotten that butter on both breasts, thighs, and legs, you want to concentrate on the outer skin. Again, you can go as fancy or simple as you want. Olive oil, butter, ghee, or bacon grease all work here. I used olive oil, garlic powder, kosher salt, and black pepper. After the bird was nice and seasoned, I threw it in the fridge for a few hours to get those spices and fats diffusing through the skin and flesh.
When you’re ready to start cooking, you want to get the heat up in your oven high. Why do they call it an oven anyway?
Sorry, sorry, trying to remove.
Anyway, back to the actual post, preheat your oven to somewhere between 425 and 450°F. I’ve seen people online go on the higher side, but when you get that high in heat, I’m not sure 25 degrees is that much of a difference. Anyway, you also want to preheat the pan in which you’re going to be cooking the chicken, as long as it isn’t Pyrex. There’s no point in preheating a Pyrex dish. But if you’re using cast iron or a baking sheet, having a hot surface to put the bird down upon will make cooking a lot easier. I used a baking sheet, which I buttered before preheating to avoid sticking. Put the chicken down on it, and if you’re using a digital thermometer to monitor, place the probe in the fattest part of either the breast or the thigh. The temperature you’re looking for is 165°F for the breast and 170°F for the thigh. Have an instant temperature probe thermometer handy to do a sanity check where your probe is and to check the part where you’re not constantly monitoring. The time will vary with the oven and temperature, but generally, it’s going to take 45 minutes for the bird to be done. You can also throw the broiler on at the end of cooking to get that skin as crispy as it can get. There are few things in the world I enjoy more than crispy chicken skin.
Perhaps the most important step comes after you take the chicken out of the oven. You have to let the bird rest. Optimally, that rest time should be at least ten minutes, fifteen if you really are scared about the juices gushing out. The chicken isn’t going to get cold in that time; it’s just going to finish cooking and redistributing the juices throughout the meat rather than having them pool near the surface. It’s a tried and true method for keeping any meat moist after cooking, whether it be lamb, steak, turkey, or whatever. Remember, fat makes the meat juicy, so you gotta keep that fat in there by any means necessary.
Now, I don’t want to toot my own horn too much, but, hand to God, that chicken was the moistest and most tender chicken I have ever eaten in my life. It was the first time I had ever made a roasted chicken, so I won’t blame you for chalking it up to beginner’s luck. That being said, there’s also something to be said for how dummy-proof spatchcocking can make roasting a chicken, and how you can take even more of the guesswork out through constant temperature monitoring. I think the most key thing here is the heat distribution and the way butterflying the chicken allows you to get more fat in places where fat doesn’t always reach.
Once you get the practice of spatchcocking and roasting down, you can play with seasonings and sides. I made mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts en fricassee with bacon (as imitated from this Jacques Pepin video), but once you get confident enough in how to do this thing, you can put vegetables and starches in the actual roasting pan with the bird. Everything cooks in one pan, and as a bonus, the fat that does seep out during cooking will then start to flavor the side dishes. The best part is that with spatchcocking, the breasts aren’t high off the pan, and the thighs can lay flush, so you can get contact between the vegetables and meat, which only enhances the flavor.
If traditional roasting is your bag, I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong. As long as what you make tastes good and is cooked correctly and to temperature, there’s absolutely no wrong way to make dinner. That being said, if you want to get more flavor up in that bird, or if you don’t want to spend so much time to make Sunday dinner, or if you want to put a whole bird on the grill without butchering the whole thing into segments, you absolutely owe it to yourself and the people for whom you cook to try spatchcocking. The minimal effort in the beginning pays dividends when you sit down to eat.