Chicken Cooked in Milk
By Cecelia JenkinsPublished on October 19, 2018
Time
1¾ hours
Yield
Serves 4
Ingredients
Before You Begin
Use only whole milk here; milk with a lower fat content will curdle. It's important to whisk together the milk and baking soda, which is key to keeping this sauce from curdling, before adding anything else to the pot in step 1. Do not skip this step. As the chicken braises, a brown skin of milk will form around the chicken. This is OK. Simply discard it when the chicken is done. We developed this recipe in a 7-quart enameled cast-iron Dutch oven. If you use a smaller pot, you'll likely need to increase the simmering time in step 4.
Instructions
- Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 425 degrees. Spray large Dutch oven with vegetable oil spray. Thoroughly whisk milk and baking soda together in Dutch oven. (Do not add wine before baking soda.) Whisk in wine, then add garlic.
- Combine 2 teaspoons salt and ½ teaspoon pepper in bowl. Pat chicken dry with paper towels. Tie legs together with kitchen twine and tuck wingtips behind back. Rub entire surface of chicken with oil and sprinkle all over with salt mixture. Place chicken in pot, breast side up. Roast, uncovered, until breast registers 160 degrees and thighs register 175 degrees, about 1 hour.
- Insert tongs into cavity of chicken and tilt chicken to let juices from cavity drain into pot, then transfer chicken to carving board. Discard any milk skin that has attached to chicken. Let chicken rest for 20 minutes.
- Meanwhile, add thyme sprigs and lemon zest to pot and bring to simmer over medium heat. Cook, whisking often, until sauce reduces to about 1½ cups and coats back of spoon, 8 to 12 minutes.
- Strain sauce through fine-mesh strainer set over bowl, pressing on solids to extract as much sauce as possible; discard solids. Whisk any accumulated chicken juices into sauce. Season sauce with salt and pepper to taste. Carve chicken and serve with sauce.
Time
1¾ hoursYield
Serves 4Ingredients
Test Kitchen Techniques
Ingredients
Test Kitchen Techniques
Ingredients
Test Kitchen Techniques
Why This Recipe Works
Milk braising is an Italian technique, most notably used with pork; it yields a rustic, nutty sauce of toasted milk curds and supermoist meat. Chicken cooked in milk is a nod to this technique. For a simple method with remarkable (and more attractive) results, we started the dish cold, first whisking baking soda into whole milk in a Dutch oven to raise the milk's pH into neutral territory, which minimized curdling later on. To give the sauce a bright note, we then added white wine (after the baking soda so the acid did not reverse the pH fix we'd found) and, for complexity, a fistful of crushed peeled garlic cloves that turned mellow and slightly sweet in the oven. We baked the chicken with the milk mixture in the uncovered pot in a 425-degree oven for an hour, until the skin was golden brown and the meat ultramoist. To amplify the toasty notes of the sauce, we reduced it in the pot on the stovetop while the chicken rested, adding a few swipes of lemon peel and a bunch of thyme to give the sauce a final bright lift. Whisking frequently meant the soft roasted garlic broke up in the sauce, giving it body and savory flavor throughout. For good measure, we passed the finished sauce through a fine-mesh strainer to easily remove the lemon peel and thyme sprigs and smooth out any errant curds. Since a dark, hard-to-scrub-off ring of baked-on milk formed around the pot, we sprayed the sides with nonstick cooking spray at the start to make cleanup much easier.
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