Poultry

Here’s how to keep a skinless, boneless chicken breast moist while giving it a crust, without using a lot of fat. This technique relies on two properties of the chicken breast that make it more like fish than like other meat: it cooks quickly, and it contains a fair amount of moisture. This enables you to start cooking the breasts with just a bit of fat over fairly high heat to begin browning, then lower the heat and cover the pan, which not only allows the meat to steam in its own juices but maintains the nicely browned exterior (on one side anyway). If you use mass produced commercial chicken, the results will be somewhat cottony. Free-range or kosher chickens are usually considerably better.

Unless you’ve made your own duck confit, you may never have cooked duck legs by themselves; but in many ways they’re superior to both duck breasts and whole birds. They’re quite lean, and just a quick trimming of the excess fat is all that’s necessary. And, given proper cooking—that is, long, slow cooking—they become fork-tender and richly flavorful, reminiscent of some of the “lesser” cuts of beef and pork, like brisket and cheek. Finally, it’s easy enough to cook enough legs for eight—which is hardly the case with whole duck!

This traditional Chinese dish is simple to make: You boil the soy and wine along with some water, ginger, and crushed sugar and add star anise and scallion for flavor. The chicken is boiled too—not simmered, really boiled—but only for ten minutes; it finishes cooking in the liquid with the heat turned off. There are unusual but inexpensive ingredients that make this dish slightly better: mushroom-flavored soy sauce, which is dark and heavy; yellow rock sugar, a not-especially-sweet, lumpy sugar that must be broken up with a hammer before use; and mei kuei lu chiew, or “rose wine,” a floral wine that smells like rose water and costs two bucks a bottle. But don’t knock yourself out looking for any of these—I give substitutions in the recipe. But if you can easily acquire them, do, because this sauce can be used time and again, as long as you freeze it between uses (or refrigerate it and bring it to a rolling boil every few days) and top up the liquids now and then.

It may seem absurd, even insulting, to attempt to reduce an entire cuisine to a few flavors, but with just a handful of Thai ingredients—nearly all of which are available at most supermarkets—you can duplicate or even improve on many of the dishes found in your typical neighborhood Thai restaurant. A few ingredients will be unfamiliar to most American cooks, but no complicated techniques are involved in either preparation or cooking. This chicken dish, which can be taken in many directions, is a good example.

The chicken must be well browned before the rest of the dish is cooked, and in this instance there is no hurrying the process. Take your time and brown each piece of chicken well; especially if you’re cooking for eight or more, this will take a while, as you’ll have to brown in batches.

Chicken with dried apricots is hardly a new idea, but it’s almost always too sweet, and the routine addition of cinnamon and cloves makes the whole thing taste more like dessert than dinner. Take them away, add a little vinegar to counter the fruit’s sweetness, improve and simplify the cooking technique, and you have a beautiful dish for a winter meal.

I had something like this on a visit to Bangkok, chicken with a creamy but spicy lime sauce. At first I thought the rich texture had come from a pan reduction or even a béchamel-like sauce, but I detected the faint taste of coconut and realized it was little more than coconut milk spiked with lime. With canned coconut milk, it can be made in less than a half hour.

This dish is so fast that you must begin cooking white rice, the natural accompaniment, before even chopping the onion. That’s because it uses preblended curry powder, one of the original convenience foods, a venerable spice rub and all-purpose flavor booster. I like to use it in tandem with a twentieth-century convenience food, the skinless, boneless chicken breast. Even a breast from a good chicken is about as bland as meat can get, and one from the supermarket is not much more flavorful than unsauced pasta. Curry changes that quickly.

This is just one of several great poultry dishes from the area around Lyon, a region whose famous poulet de Bresse was long considered by many to be the best chicken in the world. Chef Paul Bocuse learned poulet au vinaigre as a youth and, some years later, showed considerable audacity by putting what is essentially a peasant dish on the menu of his Michelin three-star restaurant just outside of Lyon. He insisted that it was neither how much work nor the cost of ingredients that determined the worthiness of a dish, but how it tasted. Bravo.

Meuniere once referred to fillets of sole that were floured and quickly sautéed in clarified butter, then finished with parsley, lemon juice, and a little melted butter. Over the years its definition has expanded, to the point where it describes a series of flexible techniques that can be applied to just about any thin cut of meat, poultry, or fish, all of which makes it more useful. You must preheat the skillet before adding the oil (or clarified butter, if you’re feeling extravagant) and you must use a large, flat-bottomed skillet, preferably nonstick, with deep, sloping sides, which makes turning the cutlets easier and keeps the inevitable spattering to a minimum.

Here’s a method that takes less than an hour and results in a crisp bird from which nearly all of the fat has been rendered. It’s accomplished by the simple procedure of cutting up the duck, then cooking it, covered, on top of the stove. Served hot or at room temperature, the bird is crisp, tender, and far more flavorful than any chicken.

Stir-frying—the fastest cooking method there is—can change your life. You can use it for almost anything, and it can be so fast that the first thing you need to do is start a batch of white rice. In the fifteen or twenty minutes it takes for that to cook, you can not only prepare the stir-fry but set the table and have a drink. For many stir-fries made at home, it’s necessary to parboil—essentially precook—“hard” vegetables like broccoli or asparagus. So in this fastest possible stir-fry, I use red bell peppers, onions, or both; they need no parboiling and become tender and sweet in three or four minutes. If you cut the meat into small cubes or thin slices, the cooking time is even shorter. I include nuts here for three reasons: I love their flavor, their chunkiness adds great texture (I don’t chop them at all), and the preparation time is zero.

Sauteed chicken should be crisp, moist, and flavorful, and you can accomplish this easily. Use a large skillet, or two smaller ones, because crowding the chicken pieces prevents them from browning. There should be sufficient room in the skillet so that the pieces barely touch each other, and they should certainly not overlap. This recipe contains no added fat—the bird provides plenty of its own—so the skillet should be nonstick, or at least well seasoned.

The wine plays such a major role here that it’s worth buying the right one. Finding a good off-dry white is not difficult: Almost any German wine made with Riesling (the grape name will be on the label) will do, except for those labeled trocken, which means dry. Although the cooking time for Chicken with Riesling is not short, it is largely unattended, and the dish can be made well in advance. In fact, as with many meat-and-liquid preparations, this may be more delicious on the second day. And this is a preparation that you can take in many directions, as you’ll see in the variations.

All Sourness is all not the same, as this simple preparation of broiled Cornish hens with lemon and vinegar demonstrates. I love the taste of lemon and sometimes grill or broil poultry completely unadorned, finishing it with nothing but fresh lemon juice. But I wanted to develop a dish that would take advantage of the complex flavor of the entire lemon, rind and all, and offset it with another, equally gentle sourness. The result is a crisp-skinned Cornish hen (you could use chicken, of course), topped with nicely browned lemon slices (sweet and tender enough to eat) and drizzled with just enough balsamic vinegar to make you wonder where the extra flavor is coming from. There are no other ingredients, though a garnish of parsley or a hint of rosemary and garlic make nice additions.

Chicken Al Mattone as it’s rightfully called, is the simplest and best method for producing crisp, delicious skin and wonderfully moist meat. All you need is a split chicken and two ovenproof skillets or a skillet and a couple of bricks or rocks. (The weight serves two purposes: it partially covers the chicken, which helps it retain moisture, and it ensures that the flesh of the chicken remains in contact with the skillet, which encourages browning.) Once covered, the chicken is transferred to a very hot oven to finish cooking. Handling the hot, heavy pan takes two hands—be careful.

Cornish Hens are better looking, faster to cook, and easier to handle than chickens. With a minimalist spice mix and a broiling technique that involves no turning, they’re perfect for a speedy menu. You can find Szechwan peppercorns (which are not really peppercorns) at many supermarkets and any Asian food market.

Branches of rosemary are ideal for this dish, especially if you live in a Mediterranean climate where rosemary grows in shrubs. You can slide the food right onto them (in the direction of the needles, so as not to dislodge them), and they flavor it brilliantly; but so does some rosemary tucked in among the chunks of food. If you skewer on wood or metal skewers, turning will be made easier if you use two sticks in parallel for each skewer, separating them by about a half inch; you can also buy two-pronged metal skewers that do the trick nicely.

The dark rich meat of a chicken thigh responds brilliantly to the strong, equatorial flavors associated most closely with grilling. This Mexican-style treatment packs plenty of punch, even if you use the minimum amount of cayenne (as I do) or omit it entirely.

Properly grilled chicken is a pleasure, even when you dress it with nothing but lemon juice—or even salt. But if you make this Ligurian-inspired full-flavored dipping sauce based on anchovies, you can turn the simple grilled chicken into something really special. And the sauce can be used for whatever else you’re serving at the same time. When you’re grilling the chicken, don’t build too hot a fire and keep part of the grill cool—don’t put any fuel under it at all—so you can move the pieces over to it in the (likely) event of flare-ups. And you can broil it if you prefer: adjust the broiling rack so that it is about four to six inches from the heat source and turn the meat as it browns.