Can a roast chicken dinner achieve restaurant-level taste? We tried | Canada Voices

Welcome to The Globe’s Recipe Lab, where food culture reporter Dakshana Bascaramurty explores what makes recipes work well.

The objective:

A restaurant-quality weeknight chicken dinner that even my picky kid will enjoy.

There are evenings when all my toddler will eat is a mound of plain rice, which he shovels into his mouth so quickly it sometimes triggers his gag reflex. Getting him to consume protein is so hard. He might eat the cumin-spiced black beans in a burrito bowl on a Tuesday, but refuse the leftovers on Wednesday. He likes eggs except for when he doesn’t. Sometimes he’ll screech like an angry chimpanzee if you so much as put a morsel of chicken on his plate.

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The rest of the family loves chicken, though, and I’m always trying to find new ways to prepare it on weeknights.

When flipping through the Brooklyn chef Calvin Eng’s Cantonese-American cookbook Salt Sugar MSG, the whole chicken recipe cheekily called “Roast duck (without a duck)” called out to me.

In my 20s, I lived near Toronto’s East Chinatown and one of my favourite cheap meals was the $5 “lunch box” from the Cantonese barbecue shop where hunks of lacquered meat hung from the window. I’d usually choose roast duck or barbecued pork served on a bed of jasmine rice with steamed broccoli on the side. After moving away, it’s become a rare indulgence I only get twice a year.

I was skeptical of Eng’s claim that a chicken cooked at home could deliver the same decadence and complex flavour of roast duck from the barbecue counter, but I was curious enough to try.

The process: Prepping the chicken

For starters, you must know that this is an achievable weeknight meal but you have to do some prep the night before.

Eng’s recipe begins with spatchcocking the chicken – removing the backbone and flattening it before cooking it – a technique that cuts down cooking time and results in evenly-browned skin. I asked my butcher to do it (and made sure he didn’t toss the back bone, which is needed later in the recipe), but you can also do it at home with a pair of sharp kitchen shears.

At barbecue shops, making roast duck is a laborious process: it’s stuffed with spices and aromatics, quickly boiled, then brushed with a mix of maltose and vinegar and left to dry out overnight. Then it’s hung in a large cylindrical roasting drum to cook.

Eng skips all that and instead asks you to mix up some spices and sauces to make a marinade that you spread under the skin instead of slathering it on top.

Before the chicken goes into the fridge overnight, Eng calls for sprinkling kosher salt on its exterior. If you’re using a finer-grained salt, make sure you reduce the volume or your result will be way too salty.

Making the jus