The New York Times - Eat: Bobby Flay’s Chicken Surprise By SAM SIFTON June 25, 2014 Bobby Flay opened a new restaurant, Gato, a few months ago on Lafayette Street in Manhattan. Flay has been a celebrity for the better part of two decades. But he works in the open kitchen at Gato the way people do when they come to New York to make a name for themselves: head down, concentrating, hard. “It’s all I want to do now,” he said recently. There is a chicken breast on the menu at Gato, served moist and salty beneath a tarragon salsa verde, with crisp potatoes, goat cheese and a tangle of dandelion greens. There is always a chicken breast on a Bobby Flay menu; there has been practically since his start, when he was the chef at Miracle Grill in the East Village. At Bolo, the elegant little jewel box of a restaurant Flay had on 22nd Street until 2007, when the building that housed it was sold, the chicken came pan-roasted beneath a blanket of what Flay called Spanish spices, with a vibrant green mint sauce rich with chiles, honey, salt and mustard. The dish was one of the restaurant’s best sellers. I ate it about 3,000 times there before eventually obtaining the recipe and starting to make it at home. Gastronauts and other food obsessives may sneer at the white meat of a chicken breast, preferring the darker, fattier taste of the thigh and leg, but Flay has never cooked only for them. Flay cooks chicken breasts that don’t taste of sawdust and string, but of chicken itself, pure and clean beneath a big-flavored sauce. You can, too. “Just cook the chicken correctly,” Flay said when I talked to him about the dish. He is 49 now, with chalk in his voice. I asked him how best to achieve the shattering crust of skin that characterized the chicken at Bolo (but not necessarily my kitchen). “You’re not looking for high heat on the breast,” he said. “Most people get that wrong. Go slow instead, so the fat renders, so you get that skin to crisp up.” Before that, though: Rinse and dry the chicken well. Wet chicken is the enemy of crisp skin. Coat it well with the spices — paprika, cumin, dry mustard, fennel, a lot of salt and pepper. “Those will become part of the chicken,” Flay said. “Dry rub is better than marinating. You get all the flavor and none of the sponginess.” Glug some olive oil into a pan that you can slide into a hot oven. Set the pan over a flame that is closer to medium than high. And then place the chicken in the pan skin down, flat as can be. “You could put a little piece of foil on top of it, and a kitchen weight, a can of something,” Flay said. “Anything that’ll put a little pressure on the breast, keep it flat, and the skin in contact with the pan.” Cook the breast that way for a good long while to achieve golden crispness, 8 minutes or more, using your nose to make sure that you are not skating too close to burned. Then turn the chicken over and slide it into a hot oven to finish cooking through, and allow it to rest on a warm plate while you finish the sauce or your side dishes: roasted potatoes flecked with lemon, for instance, and greens sautéed in olive oil. The sauce is easy enough: fresh herbs, garlic and chile whizzed up in a food processor with oil, mustard and honey. (If what you get is too thick for your liking, thin it out a little with water.) “That honey really talks to the mint,” Flay said. “Sometimes when you cut mint, you start to lose its flavor, but not here.” The result is an addictive condiment, applicable to fish and pork and roasted or grilled vegetables as well as to chicken or, even, Flay said, to beef. “Think of chimichurri sauce,” he said. The combination on the plate — a sweet mintiness with a fiery kick that offers real contrast to the salty crackle of the chicken — is magnificent. Of course you can make the exact same dish with chicken thighs if you want. But some will prefer the breast meat. Some always have.
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 22:31:10 +0000
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