Don't bother .............

[Tangerine LaBamba]

I found this recipe in last week's NY Times intriguing - http://tinyurl.com/bck5jf - and decided to fix it for tonight's dinner.

Smelled luscious.

The chicken was lovely, but not exceptional.

The bread on the bottom was a weird combination of soggy and crisp. The crisp parts were tasty, but incredibly greasy - yeah, I know, a big surprise.

I won't be fixing this one again..................

[susanna]

1. I wonder...

...though it would be WAY too much trouble for me on any given night...what if you took fat from the chicken roasting pan and collected it, then brushed it on the croutons at the end? Baking them as the chicken was resting, I guess?

I'm with you - the idea of a soggy/crispy texture to the croutons just kind of doesn't work for me either. But the chicken does sound good! And why waste good roast chicken fat?

Man, I'm getting hungry again.

[Tab]

2. I don't get it

You roast the chicken on TOP of the croutons, and you (not you, I mean generic "you", whoever wrote that) expect the croutons to be crispy at the end?

At a minimum you'd have to put the chicken on a rack, so the croutons didn't sit in the drippings, and maybe that's the trick, but still, I can't imagine any bread underneath not coming out greasy (like you found).

It sounds like there's something they left out of that recipe.

[Tesha]

3. I read that recipe...

and I also read the text.

She said she liked to use bread to wipe up the grease at the bottom of a chicken roaster pan and just eat it. I knew I wouldn't like that, not to my taste at all... don't get me wrong, I use that stuff - scraping it up to make gravy or saving it for soup, but yuk! grease on bread?

[HamdenRice]

4. What a coincidence! I made something like this last week and results were crispy.

When I miss the taste of Thanksgiving or just a stuffed roasted chicken and don't have the time, I make something like this, but the bread does come out somewhat crispy.

There are differences though in how I do it. First I toast the bread in the oven until it is dry and slightly brown. (She recommended stale bread, but I don't think that's dry enough.) Then I cut the bread into 1 inch squares and toss in a wok with a small amount of butter, with a small amount of finely diced vegetables that are available -- usually onions, garlic, celery -- plus salt, pepper, parsley and oregano. This is the stuffing.

This goes in the bottom of a glass baking dish (glass seems to hold heat more evenly and toast the dressing better than metal). The well-drained and well-seasoned chicken is "butterflied" open and laid skin up on the dressing and brushed with butter. The butterflying takes out the back only, and makes more of the moisture evaporate, makes the weight of the chicken well distributed (doesn't mash the bread) compared to the NYT recipe, but gives drippings on the dressing. The glass dish should be no bigger than the butterflied chicken.

It works well, but I can see how the NYT recipe would be soggy.

[NashVegas]

5. My Mom Used to Do Something Similar When She Broiled Steaks

She'd put toast between the top and bottom parts of the broiler pan. I've never been able to duplicate the results without grease, though :(