Here’s how cooking the bird works: Put the bird skin side
up on a rack set in a rimmed baking sheet. Blast it in a hot
oven (I’m talking 450°F), and you’ll find that, miraculously,
the breast will reach 150°F just as the legs reach 170°F and
the skin reaches delicious. No brining, no salting, no
flipping, no problems.
As I said, you do lose the prettiness of bringing a whole
bird to the table for carving, but you gain the vastly
preferable prettiness of perfectly cooked meat instead, and
that’s a trade-off I’ll take any day. Its advantages are
numerous.
Advantage 1: Flat Shape = Even Cooking
Butterflying the bird and laying it out flat, with the legs
spread out to the sides, means that what were once the most
protected parts of the bird (the thighs and drumsticks) are
now the most exposed. As a result, they cook faster—
precisely what you want when your goal is cooking the dark
meat to a higher temperature than the light meat.
As an added bonus, the bird doesn’t take up nearly as
much vertical space in your oven, which means that if you
wanted to, you could even cook two birds at once. This is a
much better strategy for moist meat than trying to cook one
massive bird.
Advantage 2: All the Skin on Top = Juicier Meat and
Crisper Skin
A regular chicken (or turkey) can be approximated as a
sphere, with the meat on the inside and the skin on the
outside. Because it’s resting on a roasting pan or baking