the best roast chicken nobody is talking about

+ an unofficial ranking

Apologies for this week’s delayed post, which you can chalk up to “freelancer brain” and the fact that I thought my 10 AM Friday meeting was indeed a 1 PM Friday meeting. Luckily I made it in time to eat a few of these spiral moon cakes, which you’ll be reading about shortly:

Before we start talking about chicken, I wanted to plug my friend Max Falkowitz’s new newsletter, Leafhopper. Loyal MessHeads know that I have developed a bit of a loose leaf tea habit over the past year, much of which has been informed by Max’s thorough, knowledgeable, thoughtful writing on the subject. Secretly I have been wishing hoping praying that Max would start a tea newsletter and he HAS, and I am already learning so much about the world of “good tea” as well as what “good tea” even means. Max is so great at communicating his wealth of knowledge in ways that are both engaging (fun to read) and useful (helping me understand TEA!). Sort of an ingestible alternative to all those shopping newsletters where fashion girlies talk about everything they’re buying from The Row (though tea is [usually] cheaper).

Anyhoo—subscribe here.

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I come to you today with an eternal question, and a very personal series of answers: what is the best roast chicken?

When I began working in food media 13 years ago as both a neophyte and a vegetarian, I began to glean the near-spiritual importance of the roast chicken. Its elegance, its elemental nature, its highly personal tendencies. Everyone had a favorite, I learned, but all of my coworkers went gaga over Barbara Kafka’s Simplest Roast Chicken, which relies on an aggressive blast of high heat and little else. I made it for the first time on an exhausting and snowy night in 2019, grateful for its expediency.

Since I began eating and cooking meat, I’ve gone through phases of roast chicken preference. Various cookbooks have swayed me in new directions: I’ve cooked both roast chickens in Sohla’s new book, both of them great; I’ve finally mastered the spatchcock.

And these chickens have become, in my kitchen, essential. They keep me fed for days, their leftovers never depressing. They often leave me with a few tablespoons of rendered fat for cooking greens or frying quesadillas or roasting carrots; they always leave me with a carcass that goes in the freezer for a future batch of stock or beans. But I think the real draw of the roast chicken is that it is a complete dish, a closed loop. It sits happily on its own. Its boundaries are easily understood.

Last year, over plates of Samin’s canonical buttermilk roast chicken¹, Louie and Rachel suggested a guide to the best roast chicken. So I’ve put together a highly subjective, categorized list, with a lesser-known winner that has recently become a house favorite. You should absolutely go ahead and disagree with me or offer your own favorites in the comments.