Here is another excellent post from Chef Alex Talbot’s blog, Ideas In Food:
On a Bed Of…
We love roasting chicken on vegetables. Tonight we decided to pair thighs with potatoes. We blanched the spuds with garlic cloves. When they were tender we drained them and mixed them with some bone marrow roasted onions. The whole chicken is resting on a bed of broccoli that was dressed with bacon fat. The idea was to roast them together until the chicken was crisp and the broccoli was meltingly tender. The trick is that you have to move things around and stir the broccoli so that it all cooks evenly. When we put the chicken in the oven the dome temperature was reading 500°F. As it roasted the fat rendered from the skin into the vegetables. As it rested the juices soaked in. Smoke permeated everything during the cooking process. In the end it was a case of the whole being much more than the sum of its parts. Chicken and vegetables, coming together to make our best dinner to date.
