Wednesday, July 2, 2008

beer can chicken

our good friends eric, melora, and margaret recently re-introduced us to a classic american recipe, beer can chicken.

for those that donut know, beer can chicken is a fairly simple recipe: rinse and dry the bird, rub it with spices and stuff, jam a beer can up the hole, and cook it on the grill. there's a fairly generic recipe at this link.

personally, I'd never had one and certainly never cooked one until recently. williams sonoma has taken the beer can chicken thing to a whole new level. they've "upscaled it", if you will, with this beautiful vertical chicken roaster. the concept is the same: rinse and dry the bird, rub it with spices and stuff, and plop the bird on the roaster... after, of course, putting beer or wine inside the roaster. what happens, in a nutshell, is that as the chicken cooks the fat drains off the bird while the booze bubbles up, replacing the lost moisture. here's the do-dad:






an hour or hour and a half or whatever later, you've got a beautifully roasted bird that is just incredibly, incredibly juicy. it takes some time to cook, but not much effort at all. plus you can load potatoes or corn or whatever floats your boat into the channel around the edge of the roaster, and roast your veggies alongside your chicken. the fat will drip off the chicken, then through the holes and onto your grill (where they will alight and smoke and it's just awesome), and the whole thing is wonderful deliciousness. for a family of two adults, like ours, it's an awesome dinner and an awesome bring-lunch-to-work-the-next-day. it also is good if four-five people come over for dinner.

I'm not "all about product placement" or whatever, but for cooks: this is the shit.







1 comment:

jay mcg said...

dudes, you can also impress the people at work with this... "yes, this is home made. it's home made by ME"