Pro tip: When making Chicken Under a Brick (Pollo al Mattone), do NOT brine your chicken. Sigh.....
I have become enamored of the benefits of
brining chicken, with wonderful, tasty bits ranging from whole roasts to just breasts. I decided to combine this technique with my normal recipe for Chicken Under a Brick. Mistake.
I brined tonights roaster for only ~2 hours in salt/spice solution. I
spatchcocked the bird (love that word!), then roasted, skin down, in a preheated cast-iron pan at 500F with another heavy cast-iron pan weighing it down. This has (in the past) produced a wonderful crispy skin and quick-cooking, flavorful chicken. However, when I went to flip the bird after ~20 minutes, I found that it was stewing in an inch of liquid! What the heck? So I transferred it to the dry, 500F cast iron pan that had been serving as the weight, and popped it back in the oven. When I took THAT out, 15 minutes later, it had produced ANOTHER 1/4-inch of water. WTF!? I flipped it over, skin side up, into yet another cast-iron pan and cranked on the convection fan to try to dry/crisp the bird. This was more or less successful, but not exactly what I had anticipated when I started this effort!
On the plus side, the chicken was tasty, if not nicely browned. On the down side, my side dishes of roasted potato slices and tomato-braised green beans were done way before the chicken, and suffered from that poor timing.