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French Chicken in a Pot  Recipe - America's Test Kitchen

The cooking times in the recipe are for a 4 1/2- to 5-pound bird. A 3 1/2- to 4 1/2-pound chicken will take about an hour to cook, and a 5- to 6-pound bird will take close to 2 hours. We developed this recipe to work with a 5- to 8-quart Dutch oven with a tight-fitting lid. If using a 5-quart pot, do not cook a chicken larger than 5 pounds. Use the best chicken available, such as a Bell & Evans. If using a kosher chicken, reduce the kosher salt to 1 teaspoon (or 1/2 teaspoon table salt). If you choose not to serve the skin with the chicken, simply remove it before carving. The amount of jus will vary depending on the size of the chicken; season it with about 1/4 teaspoon lemon juice for every 1/4 cup.

French Chicken in a Pot

Serves 4

A conventionally roasted chicken often requires a tradeoff between crispy skin and intense chicken flavor.

We wanted to focus exclusively on creating a chicken with tender, succulent meat bursting with concentrated chicken flavor.

Poulet en cocotte is a classic French specialty—at its best, it's a whole chicken baked with root vegetables in a covered pot that delivers incredibly tender and juicy meat. Sounds simple, but when we tried to re-create the recipe at home, it proved to be a lot more challenging than simply throwing the chicken in a pot surrounded by vegetables. A particular problem was the humidity in the pot, which needed to be minimized to keep flavor from washing out. We removed the vegetables—the liquid they released made the pot too steamy—and cooked the chicken by itself (after browning it in a little oil to prevent it from sticking). We also tightly sealed the pot with foil before adding the lid. And cooking the chicken very slowly kept the breast meat from becoming tough. After developing the basic technique, we revisited the idea of vegetables, finding that a small amount of potently flavored aromatic vegetables could be added if they were lightly browned with the chicken to erase most of their moisture. Finally, defatting the liquid in the pot rewarded us with a richly flavored jus.

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