Our Cluckin' A List: Cooks Without Borders' 5 most popular chicken recipes

For poultry-lovers, it probably comes as no surprise: The most clicked-on stories and recipes on Cooks Without Borders are those that celebrate chicken.

This all came home to roost last week, when a fried chicken recipe by one of our favorite L.A. chefs easily and quickly smashed all our records.

Without beating around the hen-house, here are the Top 10:

#1: Fried Chicken LudoBird Style

Crunchy, craggy and preternaturally juicy — with a delightful whiff of the South of France via herbes de Provence — chef Ludovic Lefebvre’s take on fried chicken broke the popularity index the very day it was published. If you’ve never made fried chicken before but always wanted to, this is the recipe for you. Here’s the story, and here’s the recipe.

#2: Lucky Peach’s Lacquered Roast Chicken

This is the chicken that changed our lives a few years ago — and then inspired a duck. You can see it before it was carved up at the top of this story.

#3 The Ultimate Butter Chicken (Murgh Makhani)

An infatuation with Urvashi Pitre’s viral InstantPot version of the popular Indian dish got us wondering about murgh makhani’s origins — which led us to the Butter Chicken King, Monish Gujral. Gujral’s book On the Butter Chicken Trail unlocked some secrets, and an interview with Gujral helped put everything in perspective. Our recipe (adapted from Gujral’s and approved by His Highness) was born.

#4 Chicken Chile Verde (Quick and Easy Pressure-Cooker Version)

We loved J. Kenji López-Alt’s astonishingly easy chile verde on Serious Eats, and felt a few minor tweaks could make it even better. Doing so proved to be a bonding experience for a stodgy boomer and a plucky Gen-Z’er. We’re currently working on an old-fashioned, slow-cooking, aromatic and soul-stirring stove-stop version.

Here’s the quick-and-easy miracle recipe.

#5 Crispy-Skinned Southeast Asian Grilled Chicken Thighs

Our easy-going soy-based marinade is the ticket to fabulously flavorful grilling all summer long.

Is there a chicken dish or technique you’d like us to tackle? Let us know in a comment!

RECIPE: Fried Chicken LudoBird-Style
RECIPE: Lucky Peach’s Lacquered Roast Chicken

RECIPE: The Ultimate Butter Chicken (Murgh Makhani)

RECIPE: Chicken Chile Verde

RECIPE: Crispy-Skinned Southeast Asian Grilled Chicken Thighs

The chicken that killed Grandpa: It's like Tex-Mex for produce lovers

I've been making this fabulous, colorful chicken stew as long as I've been a cook, and eating much it longer. It started life as a recipe my mom clipped from The New York Times Magazine sometime around 1970, written by Craig Claiborne, who was the Times' longtime restaurant critic and one of the premier food writers of his time. Some 35 years later, I wrote about the dish for the L.A. Times. As Claiborne conceived it, was called Rose de la Garza's Texas Chicken. And that's what my mom always called it, until her uncle Sam died the night after she served it to him and Aunt Ruth. Ruth and Sam raised my mom after her parents died when she was a wee thing, and we grew up calling them Grandma and Grandpa.  Was it being orphaned that gave my mom her evil sense of humor? Who knows. But after Grandpa died, she renamed the dish in his honor. 

Since moving to Texas in 2009, I started thinking about the dish's Texas origins. With chiles, summer squashes, corn scraped off the cob and lots of cilantro, it feels so right in the Lone Star State – Tex-Mex for produce lovers. I make it frequently in the summer, and always think of Grandpa. And my mom. And her mordant wit.

Originally, you didn't brown the chicken, nor deglaze the pan, nor use cilantro or coriander seed.  But the recipe, which has evolved over time, is basic and easy.  The original called for a whole cut-up chicken – which I still sometimes respect, if someone's coming over who prefers white meat. But Thierry, Wylie and I are all dark meat lovers, so I recently switched to whole legs. Brown them in olive oil, sweat some onion, garlic and serrano chile with toasted coriander and cumin, deglaze the pan, add the chicken back in and dump on top of it a bunch of zucchini, tomatoes and corn. Cover and simmer. When it's halfway done, add fresh cilantro. Simmer some more. That's it. For very little work, you get something pretty delicious. When the okra looks lovely (slim and small), I might slice a bunch of them in half vertically and grill them, adding them at the last minute. 

We're not there yet with the okra, and it's not really tomato season yet. Go ahead, use a can. You'll use fresh ones when they're gorgeous and plentiful. 

I give you the chicken that killed Grandpa. Now you're part of my (crazy!) family.

The Chinese lacquered roast chicken that changed my life

Now and then, a recipe comes along that feels truly life-changing. The short crust pastry for the lemon-raspberry tart I wrote about earlier this week was one for me. It wasn't a new recipe when I discovered it a few years ago – it had been right under my nose in the Chez Panisse Desserts cookbook forever, but it was new to me when my friend Michalene pointed me to it. Today it's my go-to recipe for tart crust.

Now a Chinese lacquered roast chicken has changed my life.

There's nothing more delicious than roast chicken, and every cook should have a favorite recipe for it (at least one!) in his or her repertoire. For years, my go-to roast chicken has been the Judy bird – that is the Zuni Roast Chicken from Judy Rodger's The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. It's the spectacularly flavorful, crisp-skinned chicken you have swooned over if you've ever gone to San Francisco's Zuni Cafe and ordered roast chicken for two. I will write about the Zuni chicken soon here on the blog and give the recipe, but the technique is basically this: Tuck fresh herbs under the chicken's skin, rub it all over with a lot of kosher salt, and let it sit in the fridge like that for one or two days. When you're ready to roast, wipe the chicken dry, heat a skillet on the stove, plop in the chicken, transfer it immediately to a very hot oven, and let it roast. No basting, but you  have to flip the chicken a couple times and fiddle with temperature. It always results in a fabulous bird.

When I don't plan ahead, I've used the Judy technique without the advance salting, and sometimes even without tucking herbs under the skin. It's still always excellent. I thought my abbreviated version was the simplest great roast chicken possible without a rotisserie.

So when I read about author Peter Meehan's roast chicken approach in the new cookbook Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes, I sat up and took note. "We are advocates of a hot-and-lazy approach: one high temperature, one pan, one position, one great result." He talked about how seasoning a bird ahead of time and letting it sit uncovered in the fridge lets him have an easy dinner to pop in the oven anytime in the next three days, and now I was really sitting up straight. This man is sensible! When he wrote, "I started doing this after I fell under the spell of Judy Rodger's Zuni Cafe Cookbook," I dropped the book and ran out to buy a chicken. Invoking Judy's name confers instant credibility.

In the Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes cookbook, Meehan offers three roast chicken recipes. For me, it was a no-brainer: Lacquered Roast Chicken.

Irresistible, right?

Here's the deal. This is the easiest roast chicken recipe in the universe, and the result is magnificent. 

All you do is this: Paint a chicken with a mixture of half-honey, half soy sauce, then sprinkle it with salt. Let it sit uncovered in the fridge for one or two days, then roast it in a 400 degree F. oven for 50 minutes. That's it. No basting, no flipping, no lowering and raising temperatures. Let it rest 15 minutes, then carve it and here's what you get:

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I kid you not. The skin was wonderfully crisp, the meat super-flavorful and both dark meat and white meat were perfectly cooked. The white meat was moist, juicy and delicious as the dark meat. A miracle!  I can't wait to try it again.

Here's the recipe:

Want something smashing this weekend? Pick up a chicken tonight or tomorrow, paint it with lacquer and it'll be ready to pop in the oven Friday or Saturday evening. Or paint a bird with the lacquer on Sunday afternoon and leave it in the fridge so you can roast it for an easy weeknight dinner next week. And please let us know – in a comment here – how you love it!

Meanwhile, I told Michalene about it, and what she said glued me to the ceiling: "Have you tried it on a duck?" Oh, man.

NOTE: I later made the chicken again, and it required ten minutes longer to cook – about an hour total roasting time. When it's done, the skin will be mahogany, and the legs will wiggle freely at the joints "like you could almost tear them off," as Meehan writes. The internal temperature should be 165 degrees F at the thickest part of the breast and where the thigh meets the breast. Also, when you're preparing the bird, don't worry if some of the glaze falls off the bird – it doesn't matter. That's why we have foil lining the pan.