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(mid tempo music) – Green goddess dressing first hit the scene back in the 1920s, out in California. And ever since cooks have been using it to flavor all sorts of things, including my favorite roast chicken, which is what I’m gonna show you, how to make today. Now, green goddess has gets its name from the green of fresh herbs, in particular chives, parsley and tarragon. So we’re gonna use a lot to make this dressing. In total, it’s a half a cup of fresh chives.
We’re gonna put it in the blender, so it all gets nicely mixed together. It’s good to give the herbs a head start on the chopping. So I’m gonna chop them coarsely before blending them up. So there are the chives. Half a cup of parsley leaves.
Now you wanna leave out the parsley stems, those have a bit of a bitter flavor, and they’re pretty thick so they don’t break down so easily. But I definitely will save them because they taste great when making stoke or soup.
So we want half a cup of parsley leaves. Obviously all these herbs have been washed. So we have chives and parsley, and last but definitely not least, we’re gonna have some tarragon which has a bold anise, licorice flavor.
It is crucial for a good green goddess dressing. And we’re gonna use far less than we did over the parsley and the chives. Just four teaspoons is enough to flavor the entire dressing.
And again much like the parsley you just wanna use the tender leaves and stems. You wanna save that thick stem for something else.
And actually I like dropping this stem into a soup or risotto or rice, because it lends its flavor but then you can pluck it out at the end. You just have a delicate tarragon flavor left over. All right, so set those thick stems aside, give this tarragon a little chop. Into the blender all of this goes. To flavor this we’re gonna add some buttermilk.
Now this is just quarter of a cup of buttermilk. And buttermilk’s unusual in a green goddess dressing, usually you’ll use mayonnaise. But we’re gonna marinate the chicken with some of this dressing, and when we used mayonnaise it just overshadowed all the herbs and turned greasy. Buttermilk gave us a much better flavor for the marinade. So that was a quarter cup of buttermilk two tablespoons of fresh lemon juice.
Last two little ingredients that add a big punch.
We have two anchovy filets, and I’ve rinsed these, so they’re not as salty. But I’m gonna give them a quick chop before we put ’em into the blender. Well, these are nice meat anchovies. I am an anchovy lover, I eat them straight from the tin.
I have since I was a kid. And I can tell these are good ones. Into the blender it goes. And last, some garlic. Just two cloves of fresh garlic, and like everything else I’m gonna give it a head start and a quick chop before putting it in the blender.
Just take off the roots and the skins. I like to smash it out of the skins, gets the head start on the chopping and it lets the skins just fall right away.
Quick chop. That’s it for the base of the green goddess dressing. Now I’m gonna put this on the blender and let it rip for about 30 seconds ’til it’s a nice, fine puree.
Because it’s not a lot of things in the blender jar, I often find it you have to scrape down the sides to make sure that no partially or big pieces of herbs get stuck on the sides of the jar. Hmm, you could smell that garlic and those fresh herbs. That’s pretty green and that’s pretty smooth.
Now some of this flavorful mixture will be used to marinate the chicken, but two tablespoons of it, I’m gonna use to make a sauce to serve with the chicken. And much like tradition, I’m gonna mix it with some mayonnaise.
So here I have a quarter cup of mayonnaise and just a tablespoon of buttermilk, that’ll just help loosen the mayonnaise up to make a good sauce. Oh, mm hmm, so we’ll set this sauce aside for later and now let’s focus on the chicken. Now, we’re gonna marinate the chicken in the rest of this dressing, but I haven’t added any salt yet.
All right, so into the bag, I’m gonna add a teaspoon and a half of table salt and I’m gonna add all the rest of this beautiful dressing. Oh, it’s like someone put summer inside a blender and just blended it up.
Now I’m gonna get in here and scrape it all out, because as I said, this stuff is liquid gold. I’m just gonna stir this mixture a little bit to help incorporate that salt evenly into the green goddess.
All right, we’ll set that aside. And now it’s time for the chicken. Here I have a whole chicken, about three and a half pounds.
Whenever I buy chicken I almost always buy it whole and cut it up myself. That way I know the parts are from the same chicken and will cook at the same rate, but I also love the other parts the wings and the backbones for stock. So what you wanna have is a boning knife, and the first thing I’m gonna do is hold up the chicken by its wing, that just exposes this wing joint that you can then just easily cut around. Get in there with the tip of the knife.
And when you find the right spot the knife will just go right through.
So that’s two wings. Next, it’s time to take the legs off. And the legs are really just attached to the breast by skin. And so what you wanna do is you wanna slice through the skin. Now I’ve found over the years that you really wanna slice into the skin towards the drumstick.
That way you have plenty of skin left on the breast meat. So now you get in and you can see the joint right there, you just pop out that joint. You can see it right there. And that’ll tell you where to cut to separate the legs from the body. There’s one leg.
We’ll do this on the other side. We’re gonna cut the legs down into thighs and drum sticks.
What you wanna do is look for this line of fat that really divides the two and you wanna cheat it to the drumstick side. That’s how you’ll slide right through that joint. And then you have the thigh, you can trim that up.
Now we’re just left with the breast and the backbone. And to butcher this, I like to use a pair of scissors or really good poultry shears. So what I’m gonna do is flip this over. You can see there’s this line of fat here separating the back from the breast. I’m gonna cut up that line, and you can hear it just go right through the bones.
That’s one side. Do it on the other side, right down that line of fat. And there’s the backbone, beautiful. Now we’re left with the whole breast. And first, I’m gonna cut it down the middle into two split breasts, easily done.
And now to make the breast pieces the same size as the drum sticks and the thighs we’re gonna cut each breast in half.
Now I say in half, but I’m really not cutting it in half. If I cut it in half, it would be like that. You’d have a dinky side and this big fat side. So really it’s more like two thirds, one third.
There’s one, and there’s two. Into the bag, all these pieces go. Scraps go into this bowl for a later batch of stock. And as I add them I am going to really make sure they get coated with that gorgeous green sauce.
Oh, it smells so good.
This chicken needs to marinate for at least two hours but can be done up to 24 hours in advance. Now I’m gonna put the bag in a nice clean bowl in the fridge, but first I’m gonna wash my hands. (mid tempo music) This marinated chicken is ready for the oven. And here I have a rimed baking sheet lined with foil, and that’s all you need to cook this chicken. It’ll sit right on the foil.
The foil just makes cleanup super easy. So I’m gonna roll back the edges of this bag and go in with tongs and start pulling out the chicken.
Now, usually when we marinate chicken, we like to wipe off for the marinade before roasting, not in this case. This marinade has a ton of flavor, we want as much of it to stick to the chicken as possible. So as I put the pieces of chicken on the baking sheet, I’m just gonna spread out the skin make sure it covers all the meat.
That way it’ll get good and crisp. This chicken is gonna go into a ripping hot oven, a 475 degrees.
Now that’s very hot but it’s gonna really get the chicken skin nice and brown and cook it through pretty quickly. It’s only gonna take about half an hour. Oh, that smells good.
So it’s been about 30 minutes, time to check the chicken. Now I know some of you were probably wondering if the skin in was actually gonna get crisp because it had all that marinade on it but you can see the hot heat of the oven really did its thing and it’s gorgeous and brown. Now the best way to tell if the chicken is done is to use an instant read thermometer. And the breast meat, you really want to register around 160. Perfect, 162.
And for the thigh meat it’ll be done by the time the breasts are done, but it generally should be a little bit higher than the breast meat, anywhere between 175 and 200. Perfect. All right, so this chicken needs to rest just for 10 minutes, before we can dive in and eat it. I’m gonna cover it with foil just to help keep it warm. (mid tempo music) The chicken is rested and it’s ready to taste.
Oh, it’s just beautiful, isn’t it? Let me get it off this hot baking sheet. Hmm, beautiful. Ooh, this looks like a nice thigh, and maybe also a breast piece. I like the white meat, but the dark meat, huh, is my favorite.
A little bit of sauce. Now for a taste. Ooh, I got a little skin, little sauce, little meat. That chicken is so juicy, thanks to that buttermilk brine. And you have the cooked flavor of the herbs but then that fresh flavor of the herbs from the sauce, the garlic, the tarragon, the chives.
So if you wanna make this delicious roast chicken remember to marinate the chicken in a buttermilk mixture, and roast it in a ripping hot 475 degree oven. From “Cook’s Country,” the ultimate recipe for green goddess roast chicken.
– Thanks for watching “Cook’s Country,” from America’s Test Kitchen. So what’d you think? – Leave a comment and let us know which recipes you’re excited to make or just say hi.
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