A glass dish. A chicken sitting in it. A sheet of foil pulled over the top and crimped down around the edges. Three hundred and fifty degrees. And an hour and a half later you pull that foil back and there is a half inch of gray water in the bottom of the pan and the skin has gone the color of a wet paper sack. I made that exact pan for years, because my mother made it, and I never once stopped to ask why.

It took a woman named Ida, standing in a church kitchen when I was in my forties, to lift the corner of my pan and look underneath it and tell me I had not baked that chicken at all. I had boiled it. She was not being cruel. She just had no patience for a thing being called what it was not, and I have never been able to unsee that pan since.

In this one I show you the ninety second trick that cuts the time in half and puts crisp skin on every square inch of that bird, why three hundred and fifty is the wrong number and always was, the thing your mother told you to put in the bottom of the pan that does the exact opposite of what she thought, where to put the thermometer so it does not lie to you, and how the bottom of that skillet turns into gravy in four minutes. I also tell you the one thing you give up cooking it this way, because there is one.

Nobody paid me for this. There is nothing in the description to buy. I do not have a pan with my name on it and I am not going to.

Tell me where you are watching from, and tell me this. Did your mother use the foil? I have got a suspicion it is nearly everybody and I would like to see if I am right. I read every one of these.

Chicken needs to reach a hundred and sixty five degrees to be safe. That number is not negotiable in my kitchen and it should not be in yours.

00:00 The pan with the foil on it
01:43 Why foil makes crisp skin impossible
03:26 Three fifty is the wrong number
04:14 The trick: split it flat
06:58 Preheat the skillet
09:07 Skin up, and leave it alone
10:55 The drippings are the dinner
13:11 What you give up doing it this way