brick

I tried two new cooking methods to cook two not so new ingredients yesterday. First up I wanted to roast a chicken but was short on time, so after a brief visit to the interweb, I decided to butterfly the chicken and cook it "under a brick". That is to say I cooked it in the oven with a weight on top of it.

I heated up my enameled cast iron casserole dish and two other cast iron skillets in the oven. I butterflied (simply remove back bone) and seasoned the chicken (salt, pepper, garlic powder, paprika). Then when the dishes and oven were hot, I placed the chicken skin side down in the casserole dish giving it a bit of a sear before weighing it down with the two other skillets (used aluminum foil between the chicken and cast iron skillets). The chicken cooked in about 40 minutes, saving nearly 30 minutes of cook time over a traditional roasted chicken (3.5lbs). The result... not bad. The chicken was cooked perfectly. The skin was a bit of a disappointment though. It didn't crisp up quite right. Seemed like too much liquid came out of the chicken preventing good crispiness (since the chicken was skin side down). I think the main error in my ways was using too big of a sheet of alum foil, thus preventing the juices from evaporating properly. I'll give it another try sometime soon and see if i can improve on the technique.

The second thing i cooked was roasted Japanese eggplants. I wanted to avoid the oil soaked eggplants, yet give them good flavor. The solution I came up with was to cook sliced eggplant on a silicone mat in the oven, thereby essentially eliminating the need for oil. Then 15-20 minutes later, I brushed the eggplants with a mix of oyster sauce, vinegar, sambal, agave syrup and water. This gave it a nice Chinese stir fry flavor without all the fat. tasty. (total cooking time 30 minutes at 425F, depends on how thick you cut the eggplant)