Cookbook Challenge #14: The Naked Chef

This time for our  Cookbook Challenge, we take a look at what was the very beginning of a celebrity chef empire - The Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver.

A very young Jamie Oliver

Oliver is a very well known celebrity chef and food personality, and, as it turns out, a cookbook writing machine.  A quick search at Amazon showed the British chef has least ten books to his name.  I was almost surprised to see that I own four of them! 

The Naked Chef was his first (published in...good grief, 2000?  It doesn't seem like he has been around that long!), years before he started taking on the school lunch systems.  There was an accompanying series on the Food Network that shared the same title, but Oliver appears to have ditched the "Naked Chef" moniker in recent years.  The essence of the book is "stripping down food back to the bare essentials," he says.  He seems to have the goal of demystifying dishes, making food fun, and also encouraging you to use your imagination.

Soups, salads, delicious looking homemade pastas, fish, meats, veggies, breads and desserts - Oliver has a number of nice looking recipes in this collection.  The instructions to the recipes are written in an almost narrative style using very colloquial language and occasional British slang.  There is often some leeway given to the amounts called for (example: "handful" of herbs isn't a standard form of measurement), thereby encouraging creativity, which I can appreciate.   

The recipe I chose to make was "My Perfect Roast Chicken" (recipe found here).  It is pretty much your basic roast chicken recipe with typical herbs and flavorings except for the unusual step of slashing the dark meat with a knife prior to cooking.  According to Oliver, his idea of perfect roast chicken involved moist breast meat, crispy skin, and overcooked thigh meat (huh?).  The slashing enables for faster cooking of the dark meat in order to achieve this objective.

Related side note: This clip featured below is one of the best (and most entertaining and humorous) instructional video I have ever seen showing the easiest way to truss a chicken.  Brian Polcyn is one of the co-authors of the excellent book, Charcuterie.  The other co-author, Michael Ruhlman, is running the camera.  Anyhow, I always use this method, and I also always remember who is the boss of this chicken...    

So I followed Oliver's instructions, slashing as directed, trussed the bird, and threw it in the oven.  Here is what it looked like after roasting.

Out of the oven

A very nice roast chicken recipe.  Everything was delicately flavored with lemon and the mixed herbs.  As promised, the breast meat was indeed moist, the skin crispy, and the dark meat a little overdone.

But I see what he means by liking the overcooked legs and thighs.  The dark meat gets a little stringy, but it never really dries out.  Kind of good in a sticky and lip-smacking sort of way.  Not sure if I am going to do this to my roast chicken from now on, but it was tasty. 

Jamie's Perfect Roast Chicken, plated up

The Naked Chef is a nice book, and a pretty ambitious one considering Oliver was 24 at the time he wrote it.  There are some attractive recipes (a particularly large number of homemade pasta recipes, too - Oliver spends a lot of time talking about this and really encourages people to try making homemade pasta), and he breaks them down in such a way that really anyone can pull them off.

People either seem to love or hate Oliver.  He is a wealthy, mega huge celebrity chef, has come off as somewhat "activisty" in recent years, and gave all of his children unfortunate names.  In general, I think his heart is in the right place when it comes to cooking.  And The Naked Chef is an example of that, trying to get real people cooking real food.  And it is hard to argue against that.