Over the years, we’ve given you plenty of tips and tricks to help you achieve the crispiest, most “melt-in-your-mouth” chicken skin possible! When it comes to realizing this culinary achievement, we’ve pretty much tested out each and every method of preparation, from poking the bird with a meat hammer to roasting the poultry in a bundt pan for a guaranteed, 360-degree heat to even pouring water INTO the chicken so that it roasts from the inside out.
While you certainly will find us using these bizarre-but-effective techniques on any given “chicken night” at home, there’s one particularly incredible one that has been hiding under our noses — er, our bathroom sink — all these years!
Recently, our buds over at Food52 created an entire post based off of one particularly eye-catching tweet. The author is the one-and-only Helen Rosner—if you read The New Yorker then you know exactly who she is!
Rosner is famous for her colorful and often-humorous commentary on all things food, and she frequently takes to social media to share with her followers her many creative culinary endeavors. In fact, just this past week, the writer posted quite the eye-catching selfie:
In case you’re not too sure what’s going on here, Rosner is literally blow-drying a roasted chicken, which is sitting on a plate before her. She posted it alongside this caption:
Happy snow day, I am using an astonishingly expensive hair dryer to remove all moisture from a chicken to maximize skin crispiness when I roast it.
Upon viewing the photo, we had two thoughts: 1) Wouldn’t holding a blow dryer over a chicken just dry out its skin? We’re not going to lie, that chicken skin does look awfully leathery… and, 2) Where did she get her nails done?!
But, super awesome manicure aside, the image truly is a thought-provoking one. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rosner’s bizarre poultry-preparation method enraged just as many folks as it intrigued, which forced the writer to bring forth a more thorough explanation.
She says that, before that oven dial gets touched, the whole, cleaned chicken should be salted and left to air dry in the fridge for a full 24 hours. Once that time is up, Rosner blasts the bird with ice-cold air from the blow-dryer to remove any extra moisture before finally putting it in the oven.
Whew!
Because Rosner’s post created quite the Twitter controversy, she even managed to get the attention of the manufacturer of her “astonishingly expensive” Dyson Supersonic hair dryer to weigh in…
Pretty silly stuff, huh?
But back to the chicken: it’s important to note that Rosner herself admits that she is far from the first person to use this bathroom staple in the kitchen. In her New Yorker article, “Yes, I Use a Hair Dryer to Make Roast Chicken—Here’s the Recipe,” the writer says that the beauty tool is used by “pitmasters in South Carolina, yakitori chefs in Japan, and kebab cooks in Brooklyn.”
Well, if it’s good enough for all of them, it’s certainly good enough for us! Thanks to our friends at Food52 for the heads-up on this crunchy-skin cooking hack.
Have you ever used a blow-dryer on your chicken? If so, were you happy with the results? How do you achieve the crispiest chicken skin?