Nicholas Gavin is the Culinary Creative Director of ChefSteps, where he develops recipes and is responsible for making all the food look beautiful. Nick has worked at ChefSteps for over a decade; he and ChefSteps co-founder Grant Crilly worked together at Modernist Cuisine. Nick has worked in professional kitchens both in the United States and abroad, most notably at Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain.

Nicholas Gavin

A lot of roast chicken recipes promise crispy skin and perfectly cooked meat but fail to deliver on both. The only recipe that truly delivers on those promises is our <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/ultimate-roast-chicken">Ultimate Roast Chicken</a>. But there’s another way to cook a chicken so it’s got crisp skin and perfectly cooked meat: chicken under a brick. For our version, we debone a half chicken and use skewers to anchor the parts together, which produces a flat plane of chicken skin on top of the meat, maximizing surface area contact with the pan, speeding up the cook time, and ensuring that the white and dark meat cook perfectly at the same rate. But the real key is that brick: By using an ample amount of oil, the brick keeps the skin below the level of the oil so it basically shallow-fries. Controlled unilateral cooking on the skin side produces super-crispy skin and perfectly juicy chicken.

Pan-Seared Brick Chicken