Not long ago, in Atlanta, chef Ainsley Harriot cooked chicken for a concert.
Here’s what happened. It wasn’t a bad chicken by any means. It just wasn’t complicated or spectacular—although it wasn’t tough, either. It was baked, grilled chicken, in a way that tasted like cornbread instead of ginger chicken. No cooking sauces, no spice or zestings. No smoky pinks. Nothing except a simple puddle of butter and a pair of forks. And that’s not the genius of Harriot. He does more with that ingredient, often called a quick-cooking, pro-science, pro-chicken concept: the faster and more efficiently you cook the chicken, the more tender and flavorful it will be. Some cooks will even grill it. But Harriot also manages multi-dimensional turbo chickens, cooking the chicken faster than you’d imagine to crisp-skinned, savory, spicy glory.
It’s certainly not the first science-informed approach to chicken. In fact, it’s been hard to shake the idea that chicken really should be cooked differently in the same way that man-made rocket fuels work to get us to the moon. Man-made rocket fuels make rockets faster, safer, and more efficient. The chicken-cooking world is hardly moving as quickly to reach the heavens.
Yet in recent years, a new generation of chefs is suggesting that it may be possible to cook the chicken to a more profound degree than we’ve imagined.
