This weekend I had a go at cooking Beer Butt Chicken, a rather comical but actually very real recipe in which you sit a chicken on top of a can of beer and cook it, resulting in beautifully moist meat. It's a bit weird but I'd heard that it works, so I decided to give it a shot. I won't go into the recipe specifics, because you can google the name and get a million variations, and I didn't really use any one of them.
I used Old Speckled Hen as my beer. Because of the size of my chicken, I cut the can in half, and drank half the beer. I think that I had a little too much beer in there, actually - most recipes suggest half a can but they also imply that the chicken will support the whole can, so I guess I should have used more like a quarter, or a third. Recipes vary on how much you should add to the beer, so I decided to go for two garlic cloves. I also chose not to season the bird much, because Glynn Christian tells me that you only flavour the skin with that. I avoided stuffing or rubbing it at all so that I could get at the raw beery flavour, to see how the method affected the roasting process.
Oh yes, and one more note: I cooked it for 20 minutes per 500g. Most recipes I've seen tell you to add another 20 minutes on top of that, but Glynn says not to, and How To Cook Without Recipes is my bible, so that's what I did. I didn't do any turning or any nonsense like that, although I did have to take the tray out briefly to add the roast potatoes.
So how did it go?
Read the rest of this post »
