Grillus Domesticus - Recap

The scene opens outside, on the patio where Alton demonstrates outdoor cooking skills. This time he is surrounded by grills ran ranging from a small square kettle all the way up to a gas-fired giant. Whatever grill one owns, sooner or later one will attempt to prepare gallus gallus domesticus – chicken – and without the right technique, the result is likely to disappoint. (Alton extracts a partially burned piece of something that might once have been chicken from a grill and contemplates it ruefully.) In exchange for a half hour, Alton promises to make sure the viewer's next grilled chicken is... Good Eats!

Alton starts by considering a few grill-friendly eats: sirloin steaks, lamb chops, portabella mushrooms, salmon and even pizza! All of these share certain characteristics: they are flat, uniform, lean, moist and porous. Flat simply means the food can be cooked on one side and then on the other. Foods of uniform shape and size cook evenly, important when grilling. Lean foods lack fat; while fat can lubricate meat fibers, it is also quite flammable. That leads to flares, which leave food sooty – not good eats. Moist and porous go together. Moisture prevents burning and at the same time conveys heat evenly throughout the food. It can also carry water-soluble proteins to the surface of the food, where they produce a nice crispy coating. For this water to move around, the food must be at least somewhat porous.

Gallus gallus domesticus presents problems. With a handy X-ray, Alton shows how bones and joints lurk everywhere – this food is neither uniform nor flat. The meat is moist (roughly two thirds water), but all those bones mean a lot of connective tissue, and some of that will never soften no matter how it is cooked. The breasts are made mostly of anaerobic fast-twitch muscle fibers, used for short bursts of powerful activity, while the legs are slow-twitch aerobic muscles used for slow, prolonged activity. These two sorts of muscle cook differently. And the whole thing is surrounded by a fatty skin – that fat is powerful accelerant (fire-promoting chemical). Except for the moisture, it's got none of the grill-friendly attributes! But Alton soldiers on.

The skin of mammals is complex, consisting of an outer layer of dead cells meshed with keratin, and inner layers of connective tissue and working structures such as hair follicles and sweat glands. On pigs this skin is so versatile it can become a wide variety of products from leather to gelatin (although, Alton muses, gelatin normally comes from... you don't want to know.) Chicken skin, by contrast, is much simpler. Most of the keratin goes into feathers, but there remains some that can be cooked golden brown and delicious, if one handles the subcutaneous fat that lurks beneath this layer properly. Melted, that fat is highly flammable, leading to undesireable flares on the grill.

It's off the the food store next. Alton actually likes cutting things up, so he tends to purchase whole birds, but for those who do not, most stores offer packages of specific parts like breasts or legs. Customers should expect to pay for this extra cutting service, however. Alton does caution against the purchase of “chicken chunks” packed on Styrofoam – there's no telling what they are, and the Styrofoam creates waste that's hard to recycle. He doesn't trust what he can't see or smell. So, he pulls a chair up to a butcher's case filled with chicken parts.

Alton's favorite piece of grilling chicken is the thigh – this was Julia's favorite as well, and what was good enough for her ought to be good enough for all of us. Families who prefer drumsticks might consider back end quarter, a thigh and drumstick together, which may be grilled as is or separated. Rolling to the other end of the case, Alton considers America's favorite cut – the chicken breast. He doesn't like the boneless breast for grilling because the lack of structure makes it floppy and hard to manage. And he especially disfavors the boneless and skinless breast; that skin provides important protection for the meat. His choice would be a split breast, where the breast is still connected to the rib cage beneath. But he wants the wing attached, which can be hard to find. For this reason, he returns to his original choice: a whole fryer broiler in the four to four and a half pound range. He likes cutting, he likes having bones left over for stock and he's cheap! The whole chicken purchase dovetails nicely will all of these!

Back in the kitchen, Alton prepares to dismantle the bird. But he has received emails from folks explaining how they find this operation distasteful, so he spices it up this time, first with some mood music, and finally with some mood lighting. He considers green (makes the chicken look too much like Frankenstein) and blue (too much like an autopsy) before deciding on pink, for that “likelike” look.

First, he grasps the wings, slicing down the arm and into the joint, then cutting the joint. Next he removes the legs, cutting down where the thigh and leg meet on both sides, then pulling the legs backwards to pop the joints before turning the bird over to cut around the remainder of the thigh (leaving a piece of meat called the oyster attached). Done properly, three or four cuts separates the thigh/leg from the bird in a single nice piece. To separate thigh and leg, Alton folds them against each other. This opens a sort of divot between the bones into which he makes a short notch. Laying the piece down, he uses this notch as a guide to cut the rest of the leg free of the thigh.

Alton turns his attention to the breasts. He wants to produce an “airline breast”. (Unseen hands toss a disreputable looking piece of chicken atop some unsavory vegetables onto an aircraft's tray table). At one time airlines actually served good food. One such item was a chicken breast with the first joint of the arm still attached. This offers a nice little “handle”. To cut this, Alton slices down one side of the keel bone (in the middle of the breast), and then “wipes” his blade down the side of the ribs. He finishes by holding that first joint away from the cut so that when he finishes the cut, the joint goes with the breast.

To improve the moisture in his cut up chicken, Alton builds a brine. He's got about four and a half pounds of bird here, so after stashing that in a zip top bag he adds about a quart of water. To that he adds honey and salt. He mixes that to thoroughly combine it and stashes the bag in the refrigerator near the bottom for an hour and a half.

While that chills and brines, Alton offers another model to explain what brining does. Raw muscle is about twenty percent protein. Proteins are polymerized amino acids that normally form roughly spherical shapes. Alton represents these with a ball bearing. About 66% of muscle is water in which minerals and carbohydrates are suspended. Alton uses motor oil to stand in for this. He pours that over a collection of ball bearings and it mostly flows right through – the protein did little to prevent the heat from driving the moisture out of the muscle, resulting in tough and gritty meat. The brine, on the other hand, denatures some of the proteins, causing them to uncoil. Alton represents these with steel wool; when he pours his “moisture” over them to represent cooking, much is captured by the fibers. Honey is also hygroscopic, so it holds onto moisture. Brining makes the meat juiciness and adds a nice flavor hit.

So far, so good: with the bird in pieces and soaking in brine Alton is on the way to solving the cooking problem. He can exercise better control over how long each piece cooks because he has dismantled the bird. But the irregular shapes, connective tissue and flammable fat require a special technique: bi-level cookery. In a metal suit and foil covered hat, Alton enters a giant grill to explain. On one side of the grill is very high heat, which will sear the skin before it can shrivel, and fry the skin from the inside with the subcutaneous fat. But leaving the bird over that much heat will turn the skin black as night, so on the other side of his grill Alton has a lower heat over which the bird can cook more slowly (with frequent turning). This type of fire is difficult to build and manage, especially on a small grill. Alton has a solution: the ring of fire.

Alton's chicken grilling technique begins with a charcoal chimney filled with a few pounds of natural chunk charcoal and some newsprint lightly oiled to make it burn more slowly. Other tools include towel tied into a cylinder with string and a little bit of oil to oil the hot grate, a timer, an instant read thermometer, insulated gloves, a large mixing bowl in which rests a tea towel and some tongs, a pair of disposable pie plates and a nine inch diameter pot he plans to use as a form. And finally, eight feet of heavy duty aluminum foil.

Alton measures out the foil and then crumples it into a long, thin cylinder which he wraps around the pot to make a thick ring of foil with a nine inch inner diameter. He puts that into the middle of the coal grate before turning his attention to his chicken. This being television, an hour and a half has passed in a scant few minutes, so he drains the chicken on a cooling rack inside a half sheet pan, patting it dry where needed. But, he does not wash the chicken, because he wants the surface sugars to caramelize.

Barbecuing, at least where Alton lives, means something specific. That does not mean he cannot achieve a similar flavor with a mixture of spices. Grabbing a zip top bag, he adds chili powder, curry powder, adobo powder (the sort without black pepper), ground cumin, hot smoked paprika and a little cocoa powder. Those who cannot find hot smoked paprika should at least use the hot kind. Alton adds the chicken to this bag and kneads it thoroughly to get the rub into every nook and cranny. As heat forces moisture from inside the meat, it will combine with this rub to produce a sauce, reminding diners of... that word that means something entirely different where Alton lives. Alton distributes his coated chicken back over the cooling rack for a half hour, where it will warm and dry. Starting at room temperature (or nearly so) means a shorter thermal trip to cooking temperature and a better sear. A dry exterior means less sticking.

Back outside, Alton' charcoal is ready. He pours it around the outside of the foil ring, creating the ring of fire. Inside that goes the pie pan (revealing why he wanted the ring to have a nine inch inner diameter). He rests the cooking grate on that, oiling it lightly when it has heated. He lays the chicken skin side down over the direct heat on the outside of the ring, grouping like pieces together. The total cooking time will be around twenty minutes. He'll flip the more or less two sided breasts and thighs about every four minutes, and rotate the bowling pin shaped drumsticks about a third of a turn every three minutes or so. And if a flare up occurs, he moves the grill. Moving the meat would squeeze it, forcing out liquified fat and making the flare worse. At nine and a half minutes (and after several turns) Alton removes the breasts from direct heat and puts them over the pie pan, covering them with another pie pan to create a mini-oven of indirect heat. He again turns thighs and legs, and since the wings look done he rests them atop the covering pie pan. They will stay hot there but stop cooking. At twelve minutes he leans the thighs and legs against the inner pie pan for a more gentle heat, but he continues to turn them every few minutes. By eighteen minutes or so, everything going according to plan, all pieces will be at an internal temperature of 155° F. With an instant read thermometer, Alton measures a thigh and a breast to confirm that temperature before he removes the pieces and puts them in the bowl, covering them with a tea towel and allowing them to rest for five minutes.

While you can't – technically – barbecue a chicken (at least in the south), this recipe produces a tasty barbecue flavored bird. Add slaw and potato salad you have instant summer. Although the union seems unholy at first, careful application of brine, flavor and heat with the right technique makes a union of chicken and grill produce an offspring of Good Eats!

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