By Dylan Clay
If there’s one thing that stinks with skin-on chicken, it’s rubbery skin. Over the years I’ve tested a number of methods for achieving crispy skin, and in my opinion your best options are:
Something else I wanted to test for the sake of this article is using corn starch on half of the bird to see what sort of difference there is between the above methods and the addition of corn starch.
I also know from personal experiments that corn starch works extremely well at promoting a crunchy exterior on something like wings or drums, but I’ve never done so on a whole chicken.
Chicken is one such thing that plagues many kitchens. Aside from being easy to overcook, there’s also the issue of the skin.
While learning how to not overcook your chicken will come with experience, there are several strategies you can use to get crispy skin on your chicken.
Spatchcocking or butterflying is a technique that removes the backbone from the chicken and breaks the clavicle, allowing the bird to lay flat on your cooking surface.
I find that it has a few advantages, namely:
The latter is the main reason I find this method worthwhile for crispy chicken skin.
Whole birds when roasted can definitely get crispy skin on the breast, and exposed edges of the wings and drumsticks but once you get towards the lower extremities, the skin tends to be soggy.
The same could be said if the bird isn’t elevated and is cooking in it’s own juices; The skin that’s soaking will be soggy.
Rather, a spatchcocked chicken has all parts of the skin exposed to the same convective heat.
Be sure to check out my guide/article on spatchcocking chicken, found here.
The reason for drying the bird is because the less surface moisture the bird has, the less time it will take for the heat to vaporize the water.
Simply pat dry the exterior with paper towels:
This process is something I also do with Steak when I’m trying to create a better crust. With a steak, the moisture on the exterior of the steak will physically lift the meat as the moisture vaporizes/boils.
While the bird isn’t experiencing the searing heat of a cast iron skillet, the surface moisture still has to vaporize first.
Here’s the chicken skin after pat drying:
Rather, we want to eliminate this possibility by drying out the skin before the bird even starts cooking. The air circulation in the refrigerator will also help to dry out the surface of the chicken.
To do this you want to use a baking sheet and wire cooking racks. This way all parts of the bird are elevated.
Side Note: Cooking racks also make moving the bird very easy. This is actually one of the biggest complaints among people who don’t like spatchcocking.
A metal, wire cooking rack quite literally costs $5-10.
In terms of food safety recommendations, you want the raw chicken on the bottom most shelf of your refrigerator. If your refrigerator has a drawer for fruits and vegetables, you want the chicken above these bottom drawers.
Aside from kosher salt helping with seasoning the bird and enhancing the flavor of the chicken via dry-brining, it also further dries out the skin.
You can equate this to when you go swimming in the ocean. After doing so your skin is dry due to the salt in the water.
In order to dry-brine, all you need is kosher salt.
You simply put kosher salt all over every part of the bird, including the underside which is now exposed because we spatchcocked the chicken.
Salt works to draw out moisture through the process of osmosis.
When salting your chicken, you can actually visually see this process throughout the day; On the skin you’ll notice beading on the surface of the skin.
Later in the day, this beading is no longer present as the liquid diffuses back into the chicken and/or evaporates, leaving the skin drier than before.
Here’s the chicken skin after 24 hours of air drying with kosher salt:
You could even opt to salt the meat underneath the skin just to further promote this process.
The above process results in the skin of the bird being dry. When we go to add seasonings to the bird, you’ll likely find that they don’t want to stick to the skin.
This is both good and bad.
It’s good because it means the skin is dry, which is what we want. However, it’s bad because we also want to use other seasonings on the chicken for flavor.
To get other seasonings like garlic powder, onion powder, and pepper to stick, we need a binder. As the name suggests, the binder will quite literally bind the spices to the surface of the meat.
Lots of resources will mention certain binders that don’t make much sense to me though as they contain water. For instance, butter contains milk fat, water, and milk solids.
Rather, I like to use cooking oils like olive oil – which contain far less water (less than 0.2%kg/kg).
So the oil will aid in flavor, help to brown the surface of the skin, and help to bind the dry ingredients.
You also don’t need a ton, even a thin layer will suffice.
Lots of articles on the internet will specifically tell the Readers to use baking powder on the skin to help create a crunchy exterior.
I’ve personally tested a number of dredges with chicken wings – including baking powder – and I can tell you that while it does work, the consistency on the skin isn’t very appetizing.
To me it tastes almost gritty/sandy as apposed to crunchy/crackly; Rather, I think corn starch works far better.
For something like a whole chicken though, I’ve never tested using corn starch because the above methods are more than adequate in terms of getting the skin crispy.
For the sake of this article I decided to put corn starch on half the bird to compare.
With that said, I do have a few things to note:
In terms of my own hypothesis – I don’t think the corn starch will achieve the elusive “enhanced gelatinization of starches.” This is likely due to me removing surface moisture via drying and salting.
Here’s the bird from top-down:
Here’s the half without the corn starch:
Here’s the half with the corn starch:
Corn Starch half: Parts like the wings, drums, and thighs achieved crispiness (to some extent) but the color of the breast was pretty lackluster – could be even off-putting to some. The breast didn’t achieve crispiness by the time it reached 162F, in some spots it was even paste-like.
Here’s the leg quarters after removing from the bird:
The Half Without the Starch: The breast on this half achieved a golden color that people find desirable. All parts of the chicken had crispy skin – breast, wings, and thighs/drums.
Both halves were juicy and moist.
Be sure to checkout my spatchcocked chicken recipe here – the above bird was cooked in the same exact way.
To reiterate, the people recommending the baking powder likely do so because it sets up fast and browns. However, this doesn’t change my decision; I know what baking powder tastes like on Chicken skin and it tastes like sandpaper.
My original thoughts stand and my above process worked as expected, resulting in crispy chicken skin.
There are a few strategies I’ve heard before but I’ve never considered using. They’re either too time involved or just simply don’t yield the results we’re after.
In the competition barbecue world, something these folks focus on is “bite through skin.”
For example, we’ll look at chicken thighs.
What barbecue competitors will do is physically remove the skin from the chicken thigh.
After doing so, they’ll trim the thigh meat itself and remove excess fat at the various seams.
From my article on deboning chicken thighs, I mention that on every chicken thigh there is an “open end.” The end that isn’t open is the fat seam that holds the skin in place.
They’ll then remove those fat seams and flip the skin over.
With the skin, they’ll then take their knife and physically scrape the side of the skin that faces the meat. Under the skin is a small layer of fat that doesn’t tend to render well.
On something small like chicken wings, this fat can actually bubble through the skin. This is a big reason I recommend people cook their wings well past 165F, and more into the territory of 200F – you get crispier skin and gelatinized/tender meat.
The above process is fairly straightforward on something like chicken thighs which are square in shape and the skin tends to be in excess. Putting it back on the thigh is also pretty simple.
However, for something like a whole chicken or even other parts of the bird like drumsticks or wings, this process is hardly practical.
While I think wet brining with an equilibrium brine works wonderfully for creating moist, juicy chicken, it doesn’t create the crispy skin we’re after.
In my opinion the overnight dry-brine is also way less involved.
An equilibrium brine involves measuring quantities of salt/water, acquiring a non-reactive container, and having space in your refrigerator to do so.
A traditional equilibrium brine also tends to yield soft, rubbery skin – the opposite of what we’re after.
