Chicken Drumsticks

For those of you that read the lamb breast post from a while ago, you'll remember how it got revisited umpteen times in a bid to get it right in what turned out to be a labour of love/outright slog. This one's got lamb breast's name all over it. The culprits in today's Persian excursion of poultry madness are temperature, salt, temperature again and that thorny subject of garlic.

So not being the type to wimp out of any of them, I cracked on. Not the Persian bit though. I ain't getting on no plane, fool.

The issue I've got is the safety equipment. The whistly life jacket's a good shout, I think we're all on board with that, but if your plane crashes so close to land that people can hear the whistle, just walk out of the ocean and onto the beach. In fact, I'd be happier if they did away with the whistly life jacket thing and gave us all parachutes. It's not going to soften the blow when you slice into a Peruvian mountain range at 550mph, but it's lights out by that time anyway. It's that bothersome 50,000ft drop when you see the wing fall off that terrifies me. I'm guessing it'll take a while to fall that far, and none of it's going to make a great review on Tripadvisor. Two solutions.

1. Ejector seats with a parachute in the back rest and an inflatable dinghy in the base

2. A plane within a plane. Wings fallen off the outer one? You're still in the inner one.

Now Boeing's problem's solved, let's move onto the slightly trickier problem of meat.

Vital statistics : 71 degrees for 4 hours

I was batch cooking basically. Obviously time and temperature we're in question, but I wanted to see if cooking with salt in the bag could replicate and subsequently replace brining. The other thing was to try putting garlic in there. I've read that it goes a little 'rowdy crowdy' in the bag but I was determined to give it a pop.

Above are the plain ones with a 2 drumstick/clove of garlic experiment shown below. Look at it top right. I was nervous. Good job I was wearing my parachute.

In what turned out to be a bit of a shocker, it came out looking quite nice. Sort of like coq au vin but without the veg and wine, or anything else you'd find in coq au vin for that matter.

And here's the dodgy geezer one with the garlic. If any knife crime was about to happen, I'd know who did it.

Now for all previous posts I've always gone with a super-sharp sear in a frying pan and in some aspects of life, predictability's a great thing but not when it comes to a good meal so this time, I switched it up a little. Bring on the cholesterol busting big guns of deep fat frying.

The risk was a house fire and everything that comes with and that's what I was expecting and given how tinned potatoes react when they're fried, I mentally factored this up but you know what? No raging inferno. Which was nice.

With a cutaway shot, you can see that it's still pretty juicy.

Tasting them, we thought these were pretty good but the questions were always temperature, salt, temperature and garlic. So, in turn.

Temperature

If you're going to fry like this, the intense heat makes a difference so I'd probably sous vide a little bit cooler next time so it stays nice and juicy while it gains a couple of degrees in the fryer.

Salt

I used a generous pinch per bag and it wasn't enough so I'll add more next time and weigh it to make it more quantifiable.

Temperature

These were deep fried at 180 to make sure all the skin was evenly crisped because it's difficult to do in a frying pan and it did that brilliantly. It took a while to get that crispy skin though so I'd fry at a higher temperature next time to make sure the middle doesn't dry out while it's having a dunk.

Garlic

I've read countless posts that say sous videing garlic makes it a bit funky but we didn't get anything like that. True, it was only one clove and an unsliced one at that but it tasted nice, just very subtle. Next time, I'd slice it and see how it went before adding more.


So in conclusion, it was good but could be great so there'll be an update in the not too distant.