I'm gonna show you not one, but two ways to reinvent your Sunday roast. First a
show-off bird that demands your attention, super tender with awesome
finger licking flavours, this is beer butt chicken. Yes, beer in butt of chicken,
beautiful. This method of cooking chicken was kind of American based, it was based
around the barbecue, but also it's kind of cowboy so MMM-AHH-OHH. First you need a dry rub
made with smoked paprika and cayenne pepper, fennel seeds, coriander seeds and
just a touch of cumin. Finally some dried chilies, brown sugar, salt and pepper, and
whizzed up. Have a little taste. Rubs are always gonna be super intense
but, try and use your brain anyway, am I getting sugar? Am I getting some
lightness from the fennel seeds? Do I want more savouriness?
You know from Oregon or coriander seeds and stuff like that. So you can
kind of tweak it to your liking. I want to rub it with oil, getting all the
cracks and crannies and then in with the rub but I want to get it to stick to
every part of it, create what the barbecue boys will call it bark, okay?
Which means like a kind of layer of flavour, it's gonna kind of protect the
chicken, it's also going to absorb into the kind of frying, cooking, roasting fat
and it's also just gonna give that outside layer of chicken just a smash of
flavour, this dish has got to have attitude.
Next, it's time to raise the bar, with a rather unusual way of keeping a chicken
lovely and moist. The beer up the jacksie. Now, this is something I've wanted to do
for a long time and I'm referring to the chicken right now. Okay, so I've got about
an inch left in there. The most exciting bit, we find ourself a roasting tray, we
find ourself an orifice and then we ease it down. That beer can is there for
a reason it will keep the chicken super moist and infuse it with a light beery
flavour, as it cooks in the oven at 200 degrees for an hour and 20 minutes. Base
it with good quality barbecue sauce, ten minutes before the end. While that cooks
away, I want to show you another way to reinvent the roast with show-stopping
bird number two, chicken in crust. Why?! Why would you put chicken in a crust? To keep
in all the flavour. So, really simple, couple of kilos of flour, this is like
blowout, this is the weekend, this is taking it to the next level. Mix up the
basic pastry dough by adding water and a pinch of salt, this pastry crust is gonna
seal in the chicken, keeping it super juicy and tender and when you serve it
up, I guarantee it will look nothing like your guests have ever seen. Next I want
to up the ante with an intense flavoured butter for my chicken. So I've got some
gorgeous girolle mushrooms sizzling in some olive oil, butter and garlic. Now you
can hit it up with some lovely kind of woody mushroom herbs, thyme, gorgeous,
marjoram, lovely. Right, I want to pump up the flavour
with dried mushrooms, any dried mushrooms. Some are expensive, some are
cheap, here's some porcini, you just go straight over with some boiling water
from a kettle, just cover it. The flavour that will come out of there is
ridiculous. Notice that the dried mushrooms now are limp and soft, even in a
matter of a minute. So go in with a dried mushroom, look at the colour of that water,
this is serious stuff. Leave those rich flavours to reduce and
intensify, time to prep the chicken. I'm gonna use a spatula, and we're gonna get
that under the skin. So grab this little piece of skin here, use your finger to
separate the skin from the breast meat, once you've got a couple of fingers in
there, go in with this spatula. Once you've created the pockets under the
skin, chop the cooked mushrooms with some chopped parsley in a teaspoon of truffle
oil, then simply squodge in a pack of butter.
This flavoured butter, just ridiculous. Get it into little holes, carefully push it
down into the chicken, look at that you've got flavour going all down that
breast there, that serious flavour. Now we're ready to put it in pastry. You
want it to be about a centi-meter thick, just gonna take a nice little cut at the
top here. Okay, so we've got two bits, a larger piece for the bottom into the
tray. Tie it up nice and tight so it will stay put once inside the pastry. Now
we're ready and raring to go. Put that second bit of dome over the bird like
this, tuck her into bed, then, we can cut off the excess and we're ready to crimp
it at the edge. We're keeping the humidity in, we're keeping the flavour in,
it's all staying in. The whole theory of it is just amplifying flavour and it's
dramatic and when you put that out on a Sunday roast table, everyone's gonna go
what, what's that alien that's just landed on planet Earth?
Put in the oven for an hour and a half, at 180 degrees celsius. Now the beer butt
chicken. Here he is, shiny gorgeous, finger lickin good.
Just finish it with shredded spring onion, some coriander, a little bit of
chili and that will be absolutely incredible. Then the chicken in a crust.
It is something very very special, get in there and cut around the outside. Oh?
Chicken? When have you ever seen chicken like that? Completely and utterly
beautiful and tender and gorgeous. That lovely flavour under the skin, it's just
ridiculoso.