The Rotisserie Chicken Edit
Plus a ginger brew for fumigating your nasal passage
This morning I had a powerful urge to buy a rotisserie chicken and then eat it with my bare hands. Just like, while standing over the sink. This is most likely because I don’t eat breakfast, so at about 11.30 I become consumed by the thought of lunch. But, fighting that urge is another urge, one I learned in lockdown, which is: I get an hour for my lunch, and I won’t spend it frying, or sautéing, or whatever. In last week’s Scraps I broke that rule to fry up some colcannon croquettes, and I set my smoke alarm off for the first time since records began (/since I moved in. Same thing).
Anyway the general rule now is that I won’t spend too long making lunch; it has to be as quick as making a sandwich, basically. But on Monday, I went to the shop, picked up a rotisserie chicken, and reasoned that lovingly tearing chunks off it and making a salad was an acceptable amount of labour. Just.
I pick up ready cooked chicken a lot – at my supermarket they’re £5 and, as I am by myself most of the week, I then figure out what to do with the rest of it. Brief aside: not to sound like I’ve been radicalised by the poultry industry (!!) but the chickens at Sainsburys are definitely getting smaller. I’d say the £5 bird gets you three portions of meat, plus the carcass, which I use to make chicken soup. I swear it used to be more.
Anyway this post is forming part of what I will gently refer to as The Rotisserie Chicken Edit – an occasional recurring series in which I put the rest of the chicken to good use. I’m going to do a separate newsletter about chicken carcasses and (literal) veg scraps because I have a system, and it’s high time I shared it.
But before then, a Thai-style noodle soup, and below that, a nasal-nuking ginger brew I make with all the leftover ginger and citrus in the bottom of my vegetable drawer.
1. The rotisserie chicken (that became noodle soup)
You should have a pretty good idea of how to get the meat off a roast chicken. You can cut the breasts off the carcass and kind of peel them off. I like to slice them and use them for nice-looking dishes. These birds don’t really have much in the way of wings, because they’re small, so I’ll pull the wings off and use them whole in stock. You can use a fork to shred the rest of the meat off the carcass (don’t forget the underside). I’d suggest jamming the carcass in a big freezer bag and stashing it away for a wet Saturday.
This dish comes via a wraparound ad from this week’s Observer Food Monthly. It was for a squash noodle soup, and it involved buying a curry paste, and I thought… that seems a bit lazy. I’ll make my own.
I used this recipe from Bon Appetit – although because I used red chillies, it turned, er, orange, not green. That said, this feels like a really malleable paste – you could add more or less of things you really like. I made enough to use another night – I think this paste could also be used to marinate some chicken thighs, maybe I’ll grill them and have them with a big bowl of white rice.
Dinner appropriately soundtracked by Robert Glasper’s own improv-noodling.
I added two tablespoons of the paste to a medium saucepan that already had some shimmering-hot oil in it (the hob’s on a 7/9, and we’ll lower it to a 6). The paste sizzled and the aromatics (shallot, lemongrass, garlic, ginger) started getting fragrant. I stirred it enthusiastically, and the pale-orange paste began turning a darker colour as it cooked. Rather than glogg in a load of chicken stock, I used a tablespoon of homemade chicken stock – I’ll go into my stock in another newsletter but when you make it from home, stock has a more gelatinous quality to it and it’s thick enough to spoon. If I was using shop-bought, I’d crumble in a cube and add an espresso-cup amount of hot water. Next, a tin of coconut milk goes in, and stir (or whisk, coconut milk can be thick) until it comes together. Once it’s looking homogenous, your fillings go in. I used shredded chicken, kale, sliced mushrooms, chilli, even some parsley for good measure. But coriander, a drizzle of chilli oil, leftover roast squash or sweet potato… this might be a good soup base to chuck whatever’s left from your Sunday roast in (like slices of rare roast beef…). Bring it to the boil and then lower the heat, and simmer it for half an hour.
That’s it. That’s the idea. It’s hot and sour and sharp and really fresh. Add more lime or soy to taste.
2. The bag of oranges (that became ginger brew)
I became really fixated on this stuff ever since November, when I had three days of physical and mental exhaustion that was so disorientating I honestly thought I’d been poisoned by one of my enemies. Whether it was a lack of exercise or a vitamin deficiency or the densely-hewn pestle that was 2021 furiously grinding into my poor mortar of a body, I just needed a bit of a health kick and a snooze. I am not a smoothie person (always make precisely 1.74 portions of anything, it’s always too thick, it always taste underwhelming) but I am a ‘what if I boil down ginger, citrus, and chilli into a sort of sunset-coloured elixir and do shots of it in the morning’ sort of type. So here we go.
There are a few recipes for ginger brew online. I tried Bon Appetit first, but I found blitzing ginger into mush first was absolutely pointless. Then I tried this one. I experimented with lemon and ginger, then orange and ginger, then grapefruit and lemon and ginger, and to be honest I’m still working through all the different variants on what is essentially a cheek-puckering dose of Vitamin C laced with enough spice that you might start seeing ghosts in your peripheral vision.
The best way to think of this recipe is that it’s in two parts: ginger-water on the hob, and fresh juice. BA does 6 cups of water (which is reduced to 3) and 0.5 cups of juice – I found that a bit limp. So try 4:1 water to juice (bearing in mind that water will reduce by half, so 2:1). Stick your water on the hob, and add in thick slices of the bigger, gnarliest piece of ginger you can find. Don’t bother peeling it; we’ll sieve this out later. You’ll bring this to the boil, then simmer it for about 20-30 minutes or so.
Meanwhile, juice your citrus. A few combos of this, and I have arrived at the following conclusions:
Just oranges by themselves (including clementines, satsumas, tangerines) are too perfumey and mild but definitely grab a bag when they’re marked down to 19p and add them in with other citrus. This drink should make you wince a little. Lemon and orange is good, lemon and grapefruit is great. Grapefruit by itself is a bit sour-for-sours-sake. I haven’t bothered with limes yet – maybe that will be good!
When I did the grapefruits, I also chucked the leftover skin and any flesh in the pan with the ginger just to get as much of that flavour out of them as possible. I don’t think you need to do that with the smaller fruit.
After the ginger syrup has reduced somewhat, take it off the hob and let it cool slightly. Strain it, and mix it with the citrus juice.
Now, add some heat. Cayenne pepper is great, I also really like kashmiri chilli powder to give it a really vivid, Sex On The Beach colour. Turmeric is also good and will give it a golden colour, but I find the turmeric settles at the bottom of the jar/bottle a bit. It’s no problem, you can just shake it. In each instance, I did a level teaspoon. You can also sweeten it if you like; I have sugar syrup in the fridge for whisky sours, which would work, but maple syrup would also be good (granulated sugar will need to dissolve; you could sweeten the ginger brew with sugar while it’s still on the stove).
Then I just bottle it, slap it in the fridge, and use this health kick to reverse-justify having a bottle of wine later that night. Win win.
Would this taste good lengthened with tonic water with a shot of gin? I mean, probably? In the evening though! Not like, first thing in the morning.
