Two-Day Roast Chicken with Rotisserie Gravy | Recipeish | Gustus Vitae

Thomas Keller's roast chicken is famously four ingredients: a small bird, salt, pepper, and an oven turned up too high. His whole argument is that a dry chicken roasts and a wet chicken steams, which is why he tells you to dry it obsessively and never baste it. He's right. We're going to take that argument further than he does, and we're going to replace the salt with Everything But The Rotisserie Chicken Seasoning, which is salt-forward enough to do the same structural work while dragging garlic, sage, rosemary, thyme, mustard seed, chipotle, and a little orange along with it. The result isn't rotisserie chicken. Rotisserie chicken has soft, wet, steam-basted skin. This has skin that shatters. Then you make a two-minute gravy, and it becomes the best thing you cook all year.

Almost none of this is work. It's fifteen minutes of hands on the bird, two days of the refrigerator doing the heavy lifting while you ignore it, and an hour of roasting you spend elsewhere.

• Yield: 4, or 2 with excellent leftovers
• Time: 15 minutes of actual work, 48 hours of waiting, 75 minutes of roasting
• Storage Notes: The meat keeps 4 days. The skin keeps about nine minutes, and only if you're standing guard.
• Difficulty: Easy, but you have to think about it on Wednesday to eat it on Friday. So, maybe, hard?

INGREDIENTS

• 1 whole chicken, 4 to 5 lbs, the best one you can get your hands on
• About 4 Tbs Everything But The Rotisserie Chicken Seasoning, divided, plus 1 Tbs more for the gravy
• 2 Tbs unsalted butter, for the gravy
• 2 Tbs all purpose flour
• 1 1/2 cups chicken stock, low sodium
• 1/3 cup heavy cream
• Dijon on the side, because Keller says so and he's right

DIRECTIONS

1. Two days out, take the chicken out of its packaging, pull the giblets, and dry it like you mean it. Paper towels, inside and out, into the cavity, under the wings, every fold. When you think it's dry, it isn't; go again with a fresh towel. Rub about 1 Tbs of the seasoning around the inside of the cavity and about 3 Tbs over every inch of the outside, pressing it into the skin.
2. Now leave it alone, uncovered. Set it breast up on a rack over a sheet pan and put it in the fridge, naked, for 48 hours. 72 is better. This is the entire recipe and it's the difference between a good roast chicken and the one people remember: the salt in the seasoning pulls moisture out of the skin and seasons the meat all the way down, and the cold dry air of the fridge wicks that moisture away for two straight days. By Friday the skin will feel like parchment and look slightly translucent. That is what shatters in the oven. Keller dries his bird with a towel and gets crisp skin in an hour; give the same idea two days and you get glass.
3. Skip the truss. Keller trusses to keep the bird compact and protect the breast, which is sound, but it also presses the thigh into the body and shields the crease where skin most wants to go flabby. We spent two days drying every square inch of this thing. Legs stay where they fall.
4. Roast it dry. 425F, bird straight into a large cast iron skillet or a heavy roasting pan, no oil, no butter, nothing. 60 to 75 minutes, until the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F. Do not baste it, do not open the door to fuss, do not add fat: every one of those things introduces steam, and steam is the enemy you have spent two days defeating. One note on temperature, and it's the only place we back off Keller: there's cane sugar in the blend, so 450F will take the skin past mahogany into bitter. 425F gets you the same crackle with the sugar caramelizing instead of scorching.
5. Rest it; chicken onto a board or a warm plate for 15 minutes. Leave the pan exactly as it is, fat and brown bits and all; that's the gravy. Do not cover the bird with foil. 
6. Build the gravy in the roasting pan or cast iron. Set the pan over medium heat, and add the butter. When it foams, whisk in the flour and let it cook for about 1 minute, until it smells like toast. Pour in the stock in a steady stream, whisking, and scrape every brown fleck off the bottom as it comes up. Add 1 Tbs of the Rotisserie Chicken blend and simmer 3 or 4 minutes until it coats the back of a spoon. In goes the cream, plus whatever juice has pooled under the resting chicken. Taste for salt at the very end; the blend has already handled most of it.
7. Carve, pour the gravy over the meat and not the skin, and devour.

NOTES & VARIATIONS

Only got one day? Do it anyway. 24 hours uncovered in the fridge gets you most of the way there, and even four hours beats zero. Two days is where it turns into a party trick.

Fridge smell is not a thing. A raw bird sitting uncovered on a rack for two days sounds wrong but is completely fine; this is what dry aging is. Put it on a low shelf so it can't drip on anything, and don't cover it with plastic wrap out of guilt. Plastic undoes the whole recipe.

No flour? Skip the roux, reduce the stock hard in the pan by half, then finish with the butter and cream off the heat. Thinner, glossier, more of a sauce than a gravy. Still excellent.

Spatchcock for speed. Cut the backbone out before the fridge rest, flatten the bird, and roast at 450F for 40 to 45 minutes. More skin exposed, faster cook, less dramatic at the table. Use the backbone for stock and thank yourself later.

Bigger bird, same math. Roughly 1 Tbs of Everything But The Rotisserie Chicken per pound of chicken, cavity included. This works identically on turkey; start the dry rest three days out and cut the oven to 325F after the first 30 minutes.

The leftovers are the second recipe. Pull the meat, save the carcass, and make stock with a tablespoon of the blend in the pot.

The applications from here are endless: sandwiches the next day with the cold gravy scraped on like mayonnaise, the carcass into soup, a leg eaten standing over the cutting board while the rest of it rests. But do the two days first, at least once, so you know exactly how good the skin gets.