No Smoking

I love to feed the children roast chicken, especially when Santa Maria is present, because she is so adept at getting the food cut up, and in front of the children. And they always eat everything more readily when she there. It’s magical, or so I think after serving the same meal one night when she was working—and watching Pinta reject every bite.

Roast chicken presents one difficulty. It takes time. Not work, but time: at least an hour in the oven. This is not a problem during the cold winter months when we are hanging around the house, But now that it is getting lighter in the afternoon, if not warmer, we want to run around and enjoy the fresh air before dinner.

So, the question becomes, how to speed up the process. It helps a little if I leave the bird out in the roasting pan for an hour or more to get it up to room temperature. And it helps a lot if I run the oven wicked hot, say 450 to 500 degrees. I haven’t found this to cause any dryness problems with the meat, although the tips of the wings tend to singe. The only issue has been that such high temperatures cause the oven to smoke like mad. And that tends to make the kitchen and the apartment mildly uncomfortable.

I discovered a little trick that is probably obvious to anyone who likes to make gravy. The smoke, as it turns out, wasn’t coming from the oven per se, but from the burning drippings in the pan. This evening, I poured some water in the base of the roasting pan while cooking the chicken hot and fast. The result: no smoke.

Plus the pan was unexpectedly easy to clean up. That might be the best benefit.