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Planked Chicken
Make a savory butter by rubbing into one-quarter cup of butter one teaspoon each of finely chopped parsley, green pepper and onion. Flavor with a teaspoon of lemon juice and salt and pepper. Split broiler, sprinkle with salt and pepper and put in pan in oven. Pour over it a little olive oil and allow chicken to bake until nearly done. Prepare a plank of the proper size, butter it, garnish with a border of potatoes forced through pastry bag and tube; place the chicken in the center of plank, arrange around it sautéd mushrooms and spread over the chicken the savory butter. Place plank in a very hot oven to brown the potato border and to give the final cooking to the chicken. Planked dishes are invariably served on the plank. They may be elaborately garnished with stuffed tomatoes, green peppers and fancifully cut vegetables.
A two-stage roast: the bird is mostly cooked in a pan, then transferred to a hardwood plank for browning and service. The plank is a serving vessel that happens to go in the oven, and most of the failures come from treating it as a cooking surface.
- The plankUse untreated hardwood at least three-quarters of an inch thick — oak, maple or hickory, sold as a baking or serving plank. It is worth seasoning first by rubbing all over with oil and heating it slowly in a low oven (about 300F) for an hour or so; an unseasoned board may crack or split at the temperature this recipe needs. Never use softwood, plywood or anything glued or varnished.
- "Broiler"A young chicken of about 2 to 2 1/2 lb, split for broiling. Birds now sold ready-split or spatchcocked are usually larger, and anything much bigger will not finish in the short second stage.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives no figure for the first stage; roughly 375F for 30 to 35 minutes will bring the split bird close to done but not there. "A very hot oven" for the plank stage is usually read as 475F to 500F, and it needs only 8 to 10 minutes — long enough to brown the potato border and bring the thigh to 165F.
- The potato borderPiped potato that will hold its shape and brown is duchesse: dry riced potato beaten with egg yolk and butter, stiff enough to stand up in a large star tube. Plain mashed potato slumps and weeps on the plank. Pipe it right to the edge of the board so the exposed wood is shielded from the direct heat.
- When the savory butter goes onSpread it just before the plank goes in, and be sparing — parsley, onion and green pepper scorch fast at 500F.
- Guard against scorchingOil the exposed rim of the plank, and set the plank on a sheet pan rather than directly on an oven rack. Have a metal underliner or trivet ready for the table; the wood will be hot enough to mark a surface.
- YieldOne broiler with the potatoes and mushrooms serves two generously, or three at a lighter meal. Scale to one plank per two diners rather than crowding a single board.
Planking is an American restaurant technique with a long pedigree in fish cookery — shad and salmon nailed to a board and set beside an open fire — that migrated indoors and upmarket in the late nineteenth century, when hotel and club kitchens began sending steaks, chops and chickens to the table on oak boards ringed with piped potato. By the time this book appeared, the planked dish had become shorthand for a certain kind of showy hospitality, and manufacturers sold matching planks with fitted metal trays. The instruction that planked dishes are "invariably served on the plank" is the point of the whole exercise: the cooking is ordinary roast chicken, and what the reader is buying is presentation.