Roasted butterflied chicken / Frango assado no forno.

Today I'm leaving you a simple and easy roasted chicken but all the goodness is in the dried brine.
As I wrote here and here, brining the chicken is a method that will give you tender moist meat every time.
This brine method is a dried one but it works as perfectly as the wet brine.
According to J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, the author of "The Food Lab" book, from which we are cooking this month for the Rainydaybites Cook Book Club, salting the poultry under its skin and letting it stand for a period of 24 to 48 hours in the fridge, has much the same effect as brining.
At first, the salt draws liquid out of the meat, but then it dissolves in the extracted liquid, forming a concentrated bird juice brine right on the surface of the bird that then goes to work at dissolving muscle fibers the same way as a regular brine.
Eventually, as the muscles fibers get more and more relaxed, the liquid is reabsorbed. Over the course of a night or two, the salty solution can work its way several millimeters into the bird's flesh, helping it retain moisture and seasoning it more deeply.

Extra Crunchy Southern Fried Chicken / Frango frito à americana.

Who wants KFC when you can have extra crunchy fried chicken at home? I'm not mad about this kind of food but my teenager son adores fried chicken so, he was really happy the day I made this recipe.

I confess that fried food is my nemesis in the kitchen as I'm very bad at frying stuff so, when Deborah suggested this recipe as the first recipe challenge of the month for the Rainydaybites Cook Book Club, I thought that it would be disastrous...

Actually it went very well and I can assure you that this is the best fried chicken I've ever eaten.

The interior of the chicken is moist and tender and the exterior is super crunchy and fabulously flavoured with the spice mixture from the marinade and coating.

As I mentioned here, this month we are cooking from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, The Food Lab cook book and the experiments and explanations for every recipe are a joy to read and learn.

Just so you have an idea, for this recipe, he cooked more than 50 chickens in order to achieve the perfect fried chicken, which, as you can imagine, is a lot of chicken...

Micro Steamed Asparagus with Poached Egg and Walnut Vinaigrette / Espargos no microondas com Ovo Escalfado e Vinagrete de Noz.

"The Food Lab" by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the book Deborah chose for April's Rainydaybites Cook Book Club.

As you can guess by the name, The Food Lab is more than a recipe book. Its's a book about cooking through science, meaning, cooking techniques that should be adopted instead of others, depending on the ingredients, tips, tricks, explanations about how things happen and why, etc.

It is a very interesting book and I'm loving exploring it.

The first recipe that I tried was this one. Not just because I was very curious about the method used to cook the asparagus, but also because of the walnut vinaigrette that caught my attention straightaway.

I confess that I never cooked asparagus in the microwave and I have to say, this method really works!!