If You Like to Get Nerdy in the Kitchen, Try Roasting a Chicken on a Stick

I love thinking about chicken. Specifically, I like thinking about how to cook chicken well. I can trace a line from my Mom's famous sour cream chicken with chives and paprika, to Cook's Illustrated's “easy roast chicken” in its original The Best Recipe, and on to Simon Hopkinson's Roast Chicken and Other Stories, with hundreds of other stops along the way. At home, I love roasting a whole chicken, an art form where, if you do it right, you're rewarded with a dark, crispy skin, delicious leg quarters, and tender breast meat. It's a balancing act, though. Breasts need to hit an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit, but legs and thighs are better when cooked to a higher temperature. It's not like you're cooking a perfectly round, fairly-homogenous, inch-thick hamburger, either. Chickens are … you know … chicken shaped, with different thicknesses, densities, and parts that poke out. Photograph: Horasiu Vasilescu/Getty Images Roast a chicken breast and it will cook pretty quic ... Read full article.