What do you do when you’ve got a contestant in the Eyam Marathon, a rehearsal for the Mechanic’s 150th Anniversary Review following fairly shortly after, an early departure for otherthings and – as it’s Sunday – a need for a decent Sunday lunch…?
The answer this week was to produce a Sunday Roast using the Aga baking oven. Generally I tend to pop a chicken into the roasting oven for the standard twenty minutes per pond and twenty minutes over and very nice it is too; crispy skin, typical aga-roast moist meat and so on. This week however timing was slightly unknown as we were waiting for a marathon finish – and Eyam Half Marathon is one of the hardest in the country – which made it impossible to be around for the ideal moment for putting the bird into the Aga. A later start was disrupted by the fact that the cook had to be at a rehearsal soon after so I cast my mind back to watching Heston Blumenthal roast chicken. Whilst I don’t keep liquid nitrogen in the kitchen (how many people do..?) I do find some of his ideas inspirational and try to take a lead – in a more moderate way – from them.
Very simply the Big Idea that Heston Blumenthal had for roast chicken – in my mind anyway – was to cook it slooowly… he contends that the fibres of the meat relax when dealt with gently and tense up when fast roasted. With this in mind and the business of trying to do two things at once I popped the chicken in the baking oven (gridshelf four) with a foil cover and left it for around the hour-and-a-half that we waited for our contestant to return from the torture of the run over Eyam Edge to Abney and beyond before coming back via the Plough at Leadmill Bridge.
Once we got back to the house the chicken was happily coming up to tempature in the Aga so I removed it’s foil jacket and popped it back into the warming oven and left it for another two-and-a-half-hours. After a quick snack I popped the bread sauce on – well put the two halves of an onion (clove stuck into each one) into a half-pint of milk and brought it slowly up to boiling on the simmering plate before leaving it on the back of the Aga where it sat for an hour.
At this point I went and rehearsed for the Mechanic’s 150th Anniversary Review – 3rd-5th June in Eyam Mechanic’s Institute – singing hits like Keep the Home Fires Burning and There’ll Always be an England as well as portraying Lord Cavendish before returning home around four-thirty to polish the bread sauce (Add a little more milk to make up for the evaporation, 4oz of bread crumbs and a knob of butter, little salt and pepper) and be thankful for the prep of vegetables whilst I was away.
After a ten minute rest the result was quite wonderful – the meat simply fell off the bones and even cold it has been particularly good and with a plentiful supply Oliver has done very nicely having an alternative to cat food until Tuesday night.
So all in all a successful alternative to fast roasting chicken and definitely an option for a relaxed Sunday lunch if you’ve got timings that suit it – or even want to be out for a while whilst the Aga does the work for you!