Kitchen notes

Weights and measures

• Grams, not cups. A cup of flour varies by up to forty per cent depending on how it settles. A cup of chopped herbs is meaningless. Everything here is weighed.
• Salt is fine salt, by weight. Flaky salt is roughly half as dense — if you are measuring by spoon, use about twice as much for the same seasoning.
• Butter is unsalted, eggs are medium at 55–60 g, and olive oil is whatever you would put on a salad rather than anything reserved for finishing.
• Celsius throughout, with Fahrenheit alongside in the tables.
• A pinch stays a pinch. Where a quantity is left vague it is because the honest instruction is to taste it.

Your oven

Times assume a conventional oven. Subtract twenty degrees for a fan oven, and give it a full fifteen minutes past the point it claims to have reached temperature.

Domestic ovens are frequently ten to fifteen degrees out in either direction, and they swing by more than that as the thermostat cycles. An oven thermometer costs very little and will change more about your cooking than any single recipe.

The bird

Weights given are 1.4 to 1.8 kg unless stated otherwise. A bird twice the weight does not need twice the time — what matters is the distance from the surface to the centre, not the mass, so a large bird needs proportionally less extra time than you would expect.

Every recipe assumes the bird has been out of the fridge for forty minutes. Skipping that does more damage to the timing than the oven setting does: a fridge-cold bird cooks from the outside in, and the breast is dry before the thigh is done.

Temperature

The safe figure is 74 °C reached instantly. Lower temperatures are equally safe if held for long enough — 65 °C for about nine minutes achieves the same reduction, which is why breast here is pulled at 63 and finishes at 65.

Meat keeps cooking after it leaves the heat, which is why the two columns differ. The full table, including holding times →

If you are cooking for anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised, use 74 °C and ignore the lower figures. Food-safety rules also differ between countries; follow the ones where you live.

Keeping and reheating

• Cooked chicken: three to four days in the fridge. Get it below room temperature within two hours of cooking — spread it out rather than leaving the whole bird to cool slowly.
• Stock: three days in the fridge, three months frozen. It sets to a jelly when it is good. Leave the fat cap on until you use it; it seals the surface.
• Reheating: to steaming hot all the way through, once. Soup with rice in it will thicken overnight — cook the rice separately if you are making it ahead.
• Freezing raw: joint it first. Eight flat pieces freeze and thaw far faster than one whole bird, and thaw in the fridge rather than on the counter.

What you actually need

Three things change results more than anything else you could buy: a digital scale, an instant-read thermometer, and one heavy pan that can go in the oven. Everything here can be cooked with those and a sharp knife.