The Hair Dryer Chef Hack That Makes Chicken Skin Extra Crispy
Sometimes, the best cooking hacks are right under your nose. Or your thumb, for that matter, because a random TikTok video can teach you a greater deal about making mashed potatoes than your nana ever could or show you how you can keep your garbage can from smelling.
The internet is teeming with kitchen hacks, but sometimes the tools used are questionable. Who would have thought that a hair dryer could have a place in your kitchen, too? Some netizens have used it to reheat their food, an ingenious move when one doesn't have access to a microwave. They have also been used to vacuum-seal food and apparently, with simple engineering, they also double as mini vacuum cleaners. And oh, they can also help fix lumpy frosting.
Believe it or not, hair dryers can also be your saving grace when you want to roast perfectly crispy chicken. We hope you're taking notes because this one is a game-changer.
Use a hair dryer to make your chicken extra crispy
Using hair dryers to crisp up the skin of meats like pork or duck isn't unheard of, and they can be used for chickens, too. Food writer and editor Helen Rosner figured it out a long time ago and shared the wisdom with the world via Twitter. "I am using an astonishingly expensive hair dryer to remove all moisture from a chicken to maximize skin crispiness when I roast it," she wrote.
Rosner isn't the first person to try out the unusual hack. According to NPR, famed Italian culinary wizard Marcella Hazan wrote about it in her book "Essentials of Classic Italian." The technique has been around since 1978. Hazan vouched for its efficacy as she shared how she blow-dried a duck before roasting it and ended up with a "deliciously crisp" skin. Guess we don't need to spend extra bucks on heat guns after all.
Of course, there are other ways to ensure your chicken turns out crispy: You can leave it in the fridge overnight without covering it. The key is to keep your chicken dry before roasting.