Girl Eats Food - Drunk Chicken

You're not a real cook until you've spent a day fisting poultry. And I don't mean sheepishly patting sage and onion into its hole, I mean getting gruesome and ramming a can up there.

by Joanna Fuertes Knight

July 25, 2011, 12:00am

You’re not a real cook until you’ve spent a day fisting poultry. And I don’t mean sheepishly patting sage and onion into its hole, I mean getting gruesome and ramming a can up there.

My grandmother defined femininity in three ways: An enigmatic skin care routine; a knack at turning the love of an old man into bags of green dead presidents; and the skill to roast a bird perfectly.

The problem with poultry is that birds are dirty as shit. You know those pigeons you see with club feet? They wound up that way because they’re so dumb they stand in their own turds until their feet melt… That’s birds for you. Gross. It’s understandable, then, that everyone always ends up overcooking birds in a fit of salmonella hysteria; understandable, but regrettable, because dry poultry is balls. The solution? Combine the two most basic food groups—chicken and booze—and create something remarkable.

With this shafting technique, even if you bake your bird for ten hours it will be moist as a weeping sore and much, much better than Kennedy.

Drunk Chicken

It’s really important that you find a chicken whose butthole is big enough. If it’s got a wee anus it’ll expel the can before the hour’s roasting is done. They don’t sell chicken by girth, so you just have to keep an eye out for the one that looks like a lonely old Italo Queen. Other people in the supermarket may judge you for spending a half hour carefully inspecting chicken anuses, but fuck those people. They’re probably just not up on high-end culinary stuff like this.

Ingredients

Loads of butter
A slug of vegetable oil
2 - tablespoons of cayenne pepper
2 - tablespoons of paprika
2 - tablespoons of salt
2 - cloves of crushed garlic
1 - can of beer, pint (British sized, not your shitty American lager. One must have standards.)
1 - whole chicken, mine was about 4 pounds/ 2kg

Step 1.

Go in easy and start massaging your bird with oil, getting into all the curves and folds. Once you’re acquainted, things need to get a little friendlier. Take a hell of a lot of butter and work it in everywhere. Of course, a large knob of butter needs to be concentrated around your bird’s hole. Apologies if I sound like an erotic baker or a 1950s postcard. There really isn't any way to write about this without embracing the sex allegory.

Step 2.

Chicken would still taste yummy if you seasoned it with bile and covered it in dust bunnies, but I used a basic Cajun rub. Dump all your spices together with the crushed garlic and you’re good to go.

Step 3.

Slap your rub all over. Think of it as face paint and think of your chicken as a trick-or-treating child dressed as a chicken covered in oil, butter, and spices.

Step 4.

Thanks to our continental culture of early evening drinking in parks, the standard beer can size in the UK is just right. But if you’re a Yank, you'll need one of those 16 oz deals. If you can't find one of those, just use a tallboy and pour around a quarter away or, y’know, just drink it. Jeez, there are people in Islamic countries whose fridges have practically NO beer in them, and you're just gonna throw it away?

Step 5.

Hack a generous hole in the top of your wife beater (that's what we call Stella). This will prevent it from exploding as it heats up and turning your bird into Dresden.

Step 6.

Now dump a little more of your Cajun mix into the can. This flavors your chicken's anus, and after all that fuss in the supermarket it'd be galling to end up with a bland anus.

Step 7.

Oil your can up and prepare for entry. Lube the horrible hole in your bird as well. And then…

Step 8.

Do that. The only really difficult bit is resisting your natural temptation to leave it standing there and putting a party hat on it.

Step 10.

Roast at 350 degrees F for 20 minutes per pound of chicken. It doesn’t even need basting; the flavor will keep evaporating up its rectum all by itself.