funding for bo j kangas welcome to my kitchen is provided by the citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund we're going to make two versions of perfectly roasted chicken paired with oven roasted vegetables creamy garlic aioli and crisp French bread from scratch were mastering the classics today in a delicious way I'm Bo Joe kangas cookbook author food writer columnist wife mother and grandmother I've spent my life learning about food and sharing my knowledge with others it's given me a certain perspective on cooking rooted in the flavors traditions and rhythms of life in northern Minnesota and a passion for sharing what I know welcome to my kitchen I impersonal he knew the editor and bone of a tea of food and wine I never did crack but a woman's day and and Family Circle and Gourmet magazine I had so much fun writing articles for them because every time I suggested something they thought oh yeah well that's a good idea so I got to write lots of things for gourmet you know you have to make connections it's all this thing about making connections and and networking with others and so I I would get at one point I was it I was the go-to person when someone didn't know who would who would write a story on say making sausages or or using rye flour or whatever you know cooking pleasures came back to me many times saying dude would you be able to do an article on blah blah blah you know okay yeah sure sure I'll do it I might not have ever done it before but I will do it you can't just ever say don't ever turn down somebody who asks you to do something we're going to do chicken roasted chicken two different ways and actually this could even apply to little chickens like Cornish game hens or it could apply to big things like turkeys but we're gonna use a chicken here that's about a four pound chicken and we've got it right here all right we're going to put olive oil lemon and thyme into into some olive oil and then we're going to take the lemon and great with my nice little grater we're gonna grate some of the lemon peel because that gives a really good flavor to the chicken then we're going to take this lemon and cut it into quarters and stuff it inside the chicken so we'll get a little bit of extra extra flavor from it so we'll cut it into quarters and that goes inside the chicken along with some salt and pepper and then what I often like to do is take a little piece of butter a couple of little pieces of butter and stuff it under the skin so in order to get under the skin you've got to get in there and loosen it we take the butter in put that one little piece on each side that will keep the chicken breast nice and tender and give it a really wonderful buttery flavor but on top of that we're going to brush the chicken with our mixture of olive oil and the lemon rind and thyme you'll see how nice that looks it'll be really yummy once it's all cooked okay and I'll put the rest of this inside the chicken then what we want to do is take the chicken and tie the legs together so it retains a nice shape okay here goes the chicken into a pan with a rack and that's going to go into the oven we're going to roast it at 450 for 20 minutes and then we'll reduce the temperature to 350 c'n this is the second way that we're going to be roasting a chicken and one of the problems with chickens is that often the thigh does not get cooked in the same time as the rest of the chicken so what we do here is we're gonna take and cut away the thigh from the rest of the chicken on both sides it looks a little funny but that way we're going to be able to give as much heat to the thigh meat as we we can and so now we've spatchcock the chicken we're cutting it open like that and then we're going to shove a whole bunch of peeled garlic into the center of the chicken and we're going to rip sprinkle in some herbs de Provence or almost any kind of mixture of herbs that you like fine herbs are great or dried oregano dried thyme dried rosemary and I think I'd like to put some rosemary into the into the chicken - because rosemary is very aromatic and that really makes it very nice okay then we're going to sprinkle drizzle the top with olive oil and sprinkle it with some salt and pepper and freshly ground peper this will keep the the olive oil will keep the chicken moist now what we're going to do I have in the oven I've been heating up a cast-iron pan and we're going to put this right into that pan to cook and there's a reason for doing it that way move that guy to the side here here's our hot cast-iron pan and we're gonna put the chicken right into I'm gonna drizzle a little bit of olive oil in here first okay then we'll put the chicken in and it will start cooking in this part that's very difficult to get cooked properly alright before the chicken breast takes less time in the in the thighs take more time so we're gonna put this into the oven to bake along with the other chicken and you'll have two different kinds see I started out with my food writing when I was in at Sunset magazine and that was really fun because there was always this group of people that got together and got ideas we had our planning sessions regularly scheduled we bounced ideas off each other coming to Duluth I was trying to find a way to make life as fun as it was there and never quite made it because when I did columns for the newspaper I didn't have anyone I could talk to and say what do you think of this and should we do that and is there any theme or what's going to happen or what's going on in the world I had to sort of work all by myself and so I thought well I've got this is a challenge this is something I'm going to try and do and I did I have challenged myself to get an article written once a week and in I think I got paid $7 a column wasn't yet up for today for even the gas it takes to run down there and turn it in it was a I wait to stretch my mind and try to get into a whole area of cooking and writing that I hadn't done before and so I ended up doing the liberated' cook well basically I always felt like I had to have something there that I could anchor my myself to and that was the liberated Cook was basically food processor and microwave because it was a big deal in those days my interest is always a little bit ahead of the the rest of the world and it I suppose I'm my ear is tuned to new ideas but I also want to know for sure that I'm using things that are you know in season I was in Germany in the first part of December and talking with a friend and they said you know lamb koukin does not taste as good other times of year and I realized pumpkin pie doesn't taste as good for Easter as it does for Thanksgiving what is it it's the seasonal Thing Thing in season always tastes better well with our roasted chicken I like to at the same time use the same oven heat and roast vegetables to go with the chicken and that is just one of my favorite meals in fact it's my go-to meal at the farmers market I was able to find some really beautiful purple carrots and golden carrots and usually carrots are a little bit deeper colored than that but it's really fun to roast them and and have them serve them right along with the Jenna I also someone cut but you cut the carrots into sticks and throw them in a bowl here and you can see that the color is sometimes the color does not stay with it after it's cooked but isn't that pretty look at that and then we're gonna use some purple potatoes purple potatoes actually came from Peru and purple mashed potatoes are kind of fun but I'm gonna roast them in this case cut them into about all about 1 inch squares and this is one of the easiest things to handle because the simpler you keep the preparation the better it is isn't that pretty and then I've got some little red fingerlings that I'm cutting into into chunks you have to figure now the the chicken is going to serve four to six people and so we need to have about four to six servings of vegetables here but we're gonna we're here some yellow Russian potatoes Russian fingerlings we'll put them in and one more purple potato yeah I love the color of these things so now what we do is toss the vegetables with some olive oil and the reason I like to toss them with oil it doesn't have to be olive oil but I like the flavor of it over here I have a foil covered cookie sheet and we're gonna just take our veggies and pour them all out but keep them pretty much in a single layer so that they all are exposed to all the pieces are exposed to the heat now we'll add tomatoes and we'll add the tomatoes and the bell peppers and the mushrooms and the onions later but these go into the oven right now now the veggies are not quite done enough yet but we're going to add the peppers mushrooms and onions to the to the pan and they'll scrape these aside I can tell by touching them that they're not quite ready but they won't take me maybe another 15 minutes about the time that it takes to to cook the additional vegetables and we're going to spread them around a little bit and put this back into the oven until it's done roasting and I love the flavor of roasted vegetables okay this goes back in and then well by that time the chicken should be just about ready to serve all at the same time we're going to do a garlic aioli sauce that we're going to serve with the roasted vegetables and with the roasted chicken and what a Oly sauce is it's a an italian sauce that has it's like mayonnaise only it has garlic added to it I'll start out with cloves of garlic I've got these I've got a couple of cloves of garlic in here and we're gonna add a teaspoon of salt to my food processor and then we're going to add two poached egg yolks and then we need a cup of olive oil and two tablespoons of lemon juice which I'm going to squeeze into the into the food processor and we need two tablespoons of water as well and we need to add a little bit of mustard probably about two teaspoons of of a coarse mustard and the mustard acts as a as emulsifier okay we're going to turn this on and gradually add one cup of olive oil until the mixture emulsifies and you have to add it real real slow because if you add the olive oil too fast it'll break we've got it ready to go that's good mmm very good we've got our chickens ready I'm sure they're both done beautifully and now we're ready to serve and there's some that stand out I don't know if I could say their favorites because it's said about it's a continuum but one of the most fun things was when spear magazine decided to do an article on Finnish food and finish cooking and I went to Finland with the staff from spear magazine and they the holes the whole magazine was all about Finland and I wrote all the articles in there even though someone else got the credit on some of the articles it's all you know okay that's fine I was it was it was a good experience for me to be able to do that and to explain to them because I could understand the language but none of them could well now we're going to use a whole different method for making it gets or what we call French bread but the French might not recognize this it kind of ends up tasting really good though and I people always ask me how do you do your French bread so that you end up with all that nice crusty crust on it well I'm gonna show you and bread offici indoors might say you don't do it right but yeah it works so here we start out I start out with two cups of warm water and I'll put a pinch of sugar in there because that will make the yeast grow more quickly so now I'm gonna use a scant tablespoon of dry yeast and I say scant because that's about what it amounts to when you're using one package of yeast but I always buy my yeast in bulk because it really otherwise I'd be I that papers all over the place ok so now we're just going to let the year start to bubble and that'll take just a few minutes and I don't want to add any flour to that until until the yeast begins to bubble I have put two two cups of bread flour into my food processor this is the most basic the most basic of breads because bread is basically water yeast flour and the salt is in there to control the growth of the yeast and actually to give flavor okay we're going to add 2 cups of flour just dump it all into the pit into the bowl and in order to give the yeast plenty of time to grow we're going to set this aside for maybe 15 minutes until it all bubbles up and I want to stir it now until the dough is really smooth because you don't want to have lumps of flour in there and we're when you the more you stir it up ahead of time the more we're developing or giving the gluten a chance to develop it's gotten sort of fluffy you can see and it doesn't really matter I mean you can leave this for an hour you can go out shopping and come back and it probably it's just going to make it better but anyway this is about what I want want you to see we're going to dent and we have put the remainder of the flour and the salt in the food processor because you know I get a little bit lazy I don't really want to start doing all this kneading and I like to let the food processor do it for me so now we're gonna take the the Risen sponge and turn it all into the food processor and then we're going to turn the processor on and let it grass us until the dough ball has come together and turned around the ball about 25 times and you can see this is how it looks and it's very stretchy now we're gonna take the dole and dump it out into the bowl sometimes I just leave it in in here and let it rise until it's doubled but right now I'm gonna do it the way it I really should do it I mean I'm cutting corners all the time and then I'll just take the dough and shape it into a ball and then we'll set it aside and let it rise until it fills the bowl here we have our risen dough and I usually spray my counter top with a little bit of cooking spray and then Oh an important thing is to take a clean cookie sheet and empty the unseasoned cookie sheet and spread it with flour you'll see why later that this isn't a good thing to do to keep the dough as dry as possible okay we're going to turn our dough out onto the counter top and then we're going to divide this into three parts I always think of that my little granddaughter when I do this cuz that's Isabella I'd say do you want to do this she says yes I'm good at dividing into threes so you try to have it as even as possible okay then we're gonna take each of these pieces of dough stretch it out and pinch it into a loaf very simply and we shape the French bread into a loaf and it's just a very simple kind of procedure let me try to make a nice smooth loaf out of it and there we are now this has to rise this will take about another 45 minutes and we let the dough rise on the pan I usually put it in a warm place so that the lobes will rise nice and puffy when they look like they're about doubled then we're ready to slash them and put them into the oven we've got our three loaves of bread risen you can tell when there isn't enough buy but because they're nice and smooth and puffy and now usually what I like to do is spray them down with plain water just spray them nice and well this way we get a nice crust on them when they bake now I'll slash with a serrated knife down the length of the lobes and then these go into the oven it's a preheated oven and it's and it's preheated to 400 degrees and I've got it on convection bake so now this is the important part we're going to underneath here I've got a a pan that's full of river rock you see that and I'm going to squirt about a cup full of water into the pan of rocks and that makes a whole big bunch of steam and then we close the oven door and we set the timer for 20 minutes and let it bake here we are one two and three this one was being real mean it kept rolling over on me but that happened so we can eat bread now and burn our fingers on it this was all an easy deal it's just chicken that's roasted roasted quickly and vegetables that roast right in the same oven right along with you next time we'll be baking up a storm making a sampling of delicious filled pastry there's always something cooking in my kitchen I'm Bo Duke Angus see you next time funding for bo j kangas welcome to my kitchen is provided by the citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund