During my two hundred and fifty plus days in Melbourne's Lockdown, I was on a mission to use my extra time at home to master making the perfect roast chicken. But it didn't really work out, and on several occasions I think I came very close to giving the people I cooked for food poisoning. Now, while this podcast is all about the world of work, it's not every day that you get to speak to one of Australia's most renowned chefs,
Maggie Beer. So when I got the chance to speak to Maggie Beer last year, I was desperate to know how do you make the perfect roast chicken. My name is doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium. And this is how I work, a show about how to help you do your best work. On today is my Face Tip episode, we go back to an interview from the past and
I pick out my favorite tip from the interview. In today's show, I speak with Maggie Beer about how to roast the perfect chicken. Okay, so now with roast chicken, I think during twenty twenty I maybe roasted twenty chickens, right, I was determined to perfect it, and then I found like they were getting better and better, and then they started getting worse and worse and they were undercooked, and
you know, all right, risking people's health. So what are the secrets to creating the perfect roast chicken?
The secret to creating a perfect roast chicken is one by yourself a digital thermometer. Two, buy a well bought up chook and not a supermarket chook. There is such a difference. It's phenomenal a supermarket chilk.
Will I was just going to say, how do we know if it's been well brought up? Is it just a matter of going to a butcher rather than a supermarket.
No, it's asking questions. You know, there's a lot we have to If we're looking for the best washing machine, we would do some research. For the best chook. You've got to do the same. And every state has got really good chicken farmers where they're grown out naturally without antibiotics which are used as a preventative to grow cooks
out quicker. And you want to know about their feed. So, like everything, if you want something good, you've got to do some background and make some choices how delicious Produce Awards I'm very proud of. I'm the patron of those, and each year Produce Awards you'll find they are finalists in each state. And I know, I certainly know they are in South Australia. They're beautiful chooks here because they're
within our family. But in Victoria they have, in Queensland they have, In New South Wales they have really great chooks, and I'm sure they have in Western Australia and Tasmania too. So you've got to do a bit of work to be buying well. And then it's a case of not overcooking nor undercooking your chook. And I think I did a paper with for Matt Preston at one stage and I came up with twenty nine different things that can make a difference.
Oh my gosh, what are some of those things?
Well, some of those things is for me, it's protecting the breast with some foil when cooking so the breast will dry out much easier. I cook it, say to I always cook a large chook, say to kilos, because that's a chok that's grown out naturally and allowed, you know, had a good life and so I will cook for probably two hundred degrees with the breast protected in an oven tray with not very high sides, because that's important.
So the heat gets right into the chok for the first twenty or thirty minutes, and then I will take the foil off and I will rub the chook. I have previously rubbed the chok with extra virgin olive oil and salt. And then I will cook for about fifty minutes. Then I will check the temperature at the thickest part. It must be sixty five degrees CE at the thickest part to be safe. And then I will cook it
a little bit longer. I'll drizzle it with verdues, and then I will take it out of the oven at about an hour or an hour and ten turn it over because that really helps all the go back down into the breast, which is more likely to be dry. So look, I could tell you a whole lot of other things.
I'm I'm like making notes as you talk. I'm just so excited to try these, Like what are some other things that come to mind?
Some other things, put some lemon and some thyme in the cavity, or always dry out the cavity before you start cooking, because there can be You know that they're always put in a bag after they've been processed, and so you know you want to get rid of that those juices that which are just water and blood. I quite often spatchcock the chook if I'm wanting to cook
a little bit quicker. But that rubbing of the skin with the olive oil and olive oil and salt to start with and then diglazing it with verjuice helps enormously.
I hope you are now feeling motivated to maybe make someone special in your life a roast for dinner tonight. And if you are looking for more tips to improve the way that you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered that help me work better, ranging from interest in research findings, street to gadgets and software that I am loving. You can sign up for that at Howiwork dot co. That's
how I Work dot co. How I Work is produced by Ventium with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Nimba who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sounds so much better than it would have otherwise, see you next time.