A few days later, bird number two was not the smashing success that its predecessor was, mostly because I didn’t account for the effects of the weather. On this cooler, wetter day, the grill simply didn’t get as hot, meaning that pulling it at 148 degrees didn’t carry over as much as I wanted it to by the end of the resting period. I carved the chicken and put the less-done parts in the oven to finish. Not a big deal, an easy-to-fix user error, and being a decently cooked chicken slathered with za’atar, it was still great. The $19 PoulTree offers a $60 “roaster” option, where you buy it with a Lodge pan with the idea that that’s all you use the pan for, and considering how scuzzy the pans get during cooking, it’s a pretty good idea.
A third bird, this one with no overnight brining or air-drying, simply coated in amba (see the cookbook Zahav Home for more on that goodness) and put on the grill was an unqualified weeknight success. Not a brined and marinated wonder, but still very good.
I was in Oaxaca City for the next round, where I bought a chicken from Pollos José (no relation) in the Merced market. For “not lugging a heavy skillet around in my baggage” purposes, I just brought a rod and a device PoulTree calls a “Double Coupe” that allows you to use the rod over a sheet pan. I cooked the chicken over potato wedges and while the sheet pan and spuds definitely did not help the chicken skin crisp up, the schmaltz-roasted spuds were well worth the trade-off.
If you cook the chicken over an empty pan—PoulTree’s preferred method—in too hot an oven, it can really turn into a smoke show, so you’ve got some thinking to do. My chef-pal and regular review helper Hamid Salimian got the willies thinking about cooking it in a hot oven, suggesting brining, then air-drying it before cooking it in a (not-too-hot) 350-degree oven with some veggies underneath. He also suggested marinating it with chilies for caramelization and flavor and trying to cook it breast side up.
Chef Chris Young of Modernist Cuisine and Combustion—a better wireless thermometer than the RFX, IMO—fame also weighed in. He seemed to appreciate how the PoulTree lifts the bird away from the cooking surface, a category that along with rotisserie chickens he refers to as “levitating birds,” that allow the whole thing to get uniformly dark on the outside. Putting veggies in the pan, he posited, creates steam close to the underside of the chicken, and that part of the skin won’t get as nice and crisp as the rest of the chicken.
For both chefs, I got the sense that they might be enjoying thinking about this new way to cook a classic, how they might approach it, and what the final outcome would be. (I hope they did, anyway. At the very least, I was having fun.)
This might’ve been my favorite thing about the PoulTree. It asks you to think about your desired end result and how to achieve it. It encourages tinkering, and, as a bonus, it cooks fast and easy. If you’re into chicken and general kitchen nerdery, trying it out is a fun and inexpensive way to tinker. You can make a speedy weeknight chicken with satisfying results, or be rewarded for putting a little extra care into it. If you throw some veggies in the pan, it’s worth the sacrifice.
“This will make things a bit steamier in the oven than a bare pan, but at least the smoke alarm won’t be going off,” Young says. “Personally, I think you want something like potatoes, that benefit from the drippings … For me, nothing beats potatoes soaking up the drippings from a levitating bird.”
