I was just sitting outside, enjoying a couple of pipefulls of some fine, Virginia tobacco, enjoying an Old Fashioned made with an excellent Alabama whiskey and listening to the Newsboys only to come inside and have my wife ask me to make some bisuits.
Butter bombs, to be exact.
That was preceded by her asking me to deep fry a whole chicken.
How am I doing? Better than I deserve.
Update: The deep-fried chicken came out underdone. It had very small red dots in the flesh, as if there were small, individual points deep in the meat that didn't get cooked. The recipe called for 20-30 minutes at 350 degrees. This is the second time I've used the recipe and the first time I did 25 minutes and the bird came out perfectly. This time, I did 27 minutes and it was underdone.
Go figure.
In my post-mortem, I realized that deep-frying is pretty forgiving on the high side. Since there was no breading to burn, I could have done the 30 minute version and been just fine. It wasn't like the meat was going to get tough or dry.
Live and learn.
I think that the big problem with cooking whole chickens is that they vary so much in their heat-transfer characteristics with size. A small increase in the distance the heat needs to penetrate translates to fairly large increases in the time necessary.
ReplyDeleteIt would probably help to write down the weight of the bird that cooked in 25 minutes, and then check the weights in the future so you can adjust the time up and down as needed. Poking around a bit, I see that the recommendation is about 3.5 minutes per pound of bird.
If you don't have an electronic kitchen scale, I highly recommend one. Ours was only $20, is accurate to about a gram, and can weigh up to 11 pounds. And I use it for everything I can because measuring ingredients by weight is so much more reproducible than measuring by volume. And measuring, say, honey or molasses into something by drizzling it in while watching the weight, is way less messy than trying to do it with measuring cups.