Looks Pretty Tasty

Time: 1 Hour 45 Minutes

Ingredient Availability: 4/5

Difficulty: 2/5

When I was in college, one of my favorite things to eat was a shawarma wrap. Although I think I would typically get the lamb, I don’t imagine that the chicken could be too far off. In this recipe from the Zaytinya Cookbook, I hope to recreate some of those flavors at home

Key Ingredients & Omissions:

One thing about this cookbook is that it does like to ask for pretty specific versions of some ingredients that are just not easy to find. Specifically, this recipe asks you to use Aleppo pepper. I still have not been able to find this ingredient in a local grocery store and I don’t plan on ordering online. I substituted it with a combination of cayenne pepper and paprika. Other than that, all of the rest of the ingredients are pretty standard.

Tools:

• Kitchen Scissors/shears

• Sharp Knife

• Cooling/baking Rack

• Rasp Style Grater/microplane

• Pastry Brush

Cooking Review:

Spatchcock Chicken: 8 Minutes

To start, I set up a cooling rack over an aluminum foil lined baking sheet. Then, I removed the spine of the chicken using the kitchen shears, flipped the chicken and pressed the breast down to break the wishbone and flatten the chicken.

Prepare seasonings & Oil: 11 minutes

I combined all of the spices for the chicken in a bowl, then used a microplane to grate the garlic into a bowl followed by some olive oil. I mixed the garlic into the oil to evenly disperse it.

Season Chicken: 7 Minutes

After seasoning the chicken with some kosher salt, I used the pastry brush to brush the garlic oil all over the chicken. Finally, I sprinkled as much of the seasoning as I could onto the chicken. The recipe says to use 3-4 tbsp, but I really felt like I was putting too much on pretty quickly, I definitely didn’t get a full 2 tbsp on the chicken.

Bake & Cool: 1 Hour 25 minutes

It took 1 hour and 15 minutes for the chicken to cook through completely. I would’ve expected it to cook a little quicker because it was spatchcocked and cooking at such a high temperature (425F), but the breast only registered 155 a little after an hour had passed. I removed the chicken from the oven and let it cool for 10 minutes before slicing up.

Analysis:

Have you ever baked some chicken and seasoned it somewhat randomly but made sure that it was fully coated only to dig in for it to be lacking much flavor at all? That’s what this chicken tastes like. All of those seasonings used on this chicken and it hardly tastes of anything but plain chicken. Sure, I could probably have seasoned it with a lot more salt than what I did, but I think that the seasoning mix should just have salt in it, so that even if you under salt the chicken, the seasoning can help pick up the slack. I know most people would probably under salt many things, as they just see the surface and don’t realize they have to account for the inside of the meat, too. It was very disappointing, to say the least. I season and bake a whole chicken every two weeks for my lunch and it very rarely comes out this boring. Maybe if there were more salt, the rest of the flavors would really start to sing. As is, this recipe is kind of a waste. The chicken was well cooked, at least. I’m going to give this recipe a 5/10. It’s not inedible, just a waste of a lot of seasonings and effort for something that you could probably best with less effort.