Andrew Zimmern's Advice For No-Skill Poached Chicken

Set it and forget it. Wouldn't it be nice if you could do that with your poached chicken dinner and then veg out in front of the TV while you wait for dinner to be done? According to celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern, you can. In an interview on "Good Morning America," Zimmern demonstrated his simple, yet ingenious technique to poach a whole chicken. Fortunately for TV-loving home gourmands, his cooking technique takes almost no energy or effort at all.

He starts with enough chicken broth to cover a whole bird, and, once boiling, gently slides the chicken into the liquid. It'll boil in the broth for up to 10 minutes. This number is a bit flexible, however. According to Zimmern, how long it cooks at a boil depends upon on the bird's size. He then tops the pot with a lid and lets the chicken sit for a full minute, noting that this initial high heat starts to melt the bird's fat while fueling the entire cooking process.

Then comes the set-it-and-forget-it part of the equation: For the next 90 minutes, Zimmern allows his chicken to cook in the covered pot off the heat. This technique, called carryover cooking, capitalizes on this principle by allowing the bird to stay immersed in the hot water and continue cooking. The lid helps to seal the heat inside the pot until the bird reaches juicy perfection.

Carryover cooking is usually applied in a slightly different manner, though the principle still applies. For instance, when roasting a chicken in the oven, many cooks remove it from the heat and allow it to sit for several minutes before serving. During the cooking process, the bird's muscle fibers begin to toughen and tighten. Once taken out of the oven, heat continues to work its way inward through the meat, raising its internal temperature. Resting your chicken encourages the muscle fibers to loosen, releasing the juices back into the bird.

However, this process doesn't only happen during oven-roasting, and it's all due to the principle of thermodynamics. (It doesn't just happen when you cook chicken, either. Grilled steak, baked fish, and other animal proteins respond to this principle, too.) In the case of Andrew Zimmern's set-it-and-forget-it recipe, turning off the burner and allowing the water and the chicken to cool down for an hour and a half taps into a variation of carryover cooking. The heat that remains in the water eventually transfers into the bird. This technique is the reason why the chicken remains so juicy inside, even in the breast meat.

Andrew Zimmern often uses this poached chicken recipe for chicken salad recipes or soups. However, it's also a prime candidate for simple poached chicken dinner dishes. For example, the celebrity chef embraces this cooking method when he makes Hainanese chicken with steamed rice (viaYouTube).

Steaming up a batch of rice begins the meal. He creates a dome of rice for the chicken to rest upon by rubbing the inside of a small bowl with the chicken broth. This, he fills with steamed rice. The rice slides out onto the plate easily thanks to the fat and moisture from the broth. Zimmern tops the rice with cut pieces of his poached chicken and garnishes the plate with green onion, drizzling a ginger-garlic sauce on top. A soy dipping sauce typically sides the meal. However, Zimmern's poached chicken is versatile enough that it'd also taste great with other condiments, like the peanut sauce you'd make for spring rolls or  even that coveted hot sauce, sriracha.

If you'd like to try it out, one of the biggest benefits of this technique is its versatility. Jambalaya, pasta bakes, curry dishes, and chicken casserole count among the kinds of dishes that would also work with the simple, but tasty flavors of Andrew Zimmern's poached chicken.