Ingredients Chicken Zuni Chicken (Roast Chicken with Bread Salad) 5.0 (6,083) Add your rating & review “I’ve always been confident that simple, delicious food is good on its own terms. You just have to not mess it up.” — Judy Rodgers By Judy Rodgers Judy Rodgers F&W Star Chef » See All F&W Chef Superstars Culinary laureate Judy Rodgers has been seeing to the brick hearth at Zuni Café, her San Francisco gem, since 1987—a 26-year stretch that’s seen the chef through five James Beard Awards and the publishing of her seminal Zuni Café Cookbook. “Through great fortune and coincidence,” Rodgers spent her senior year of high school abroad, living with the dynastic Troisgras clan at Les Frères Troisgros in Roanne, France. The experience left its mark. “I went to school every day, and spent every other waking minute absorbing the food and the culture of that region and that family,” she remembers. After returning to the States to attend Stanford University, Rodgers connected with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse, where she spent two years as a lunch chef. She brought Waters’s legendary reverence for local, seasonal produce with her when she tackled American food at the Union Hotel in Benicia, California, in the early ’80s. Later in the decade Rodgers joined Zuni Café, starting its transformation into an American culinary landmark. Rodgers took a moment with Food & Wine to tell us about indelible meals, quiet wines and her standard-bearing roast chicken. What dish are you most famous for? The Zuni roast chicken with bread salad. When I got to Zuni, everybody was building brick ovens. They were commonly being used for pizza but I did not want to become a pizzeria. I thought I would use it for vegetables and fish, and then I had this idea about trying to roast a whole chicken to order. It has become one of those things you do when you come to San Francisco: You go up Coit Tower, you cross the Golden Gate Bridge, you take a cable car and you eat roast chicken at Zuni Café. Who is your food mentor? My first one was Jean Troisgros. Les Frères Troisgros was the first place I was involved in food. Every day I learned something new: Jean taught me to taste and smell things every time I cook. You have to adjust how you cook and season your dishes based on the ingredients you are using on any given day. He taught me to use a pan that is the right size for a specific preparation: If you use a pan that is too big you are going to end up scorching things, and if the pan is too small you are going to end up steaming things. It doesn’t matter how good the ingredients are, if you screw up the execution. What is the best dish for a neophyte cook to try? Cook something that you know. If you like strawberries and you know that you can get good strawberries, do a dish using good strawberries. Do not cook fish if you cannot get good fish, if you do not know how to choose good fish. What’s the most important trait you need to be a great cook? There is no most important trait, but paying really close attention helps. Food is not destined to be good or destined to be bad—it is what you do to it or what you do not do to it that affects the results. If something browned really well, you have to ask, “What did I do? Did I set the flame low? How hot was the pan when I added the food? What sound did it make when I added the food to the pan? What did it smell like when it tasted really good? What did it smell like when it tasted really bad?” It’s important to pay attention to all the data that your ingredients, your techniques and your tools are providing you with. If you do not know what you did, you cannot repeat it. Is there a culinary skill or type of dish that you wish you were better at? I certainly love it, but I do not know anything about producing Asian food. I once had to write a blurb for the jacket of an Indonesian cookbook and I ended up cooking a bunch of the recipes. It was such a revelation—I was delighted with the results, but I also realized how little I know about the ingredients, the tools and the techniques that are used in that cuisine What is your secret-weapon ingredient? It is hardly a secret, but I would say I am pretty well known for the way I use salt. I pioneered and popularized the idea of dry brining—curing things with salt before you cook them so that they are more tender and succulent. I also started salting desserts 30 years ago and now you can go to the grocery store and get a salted chocolate bar. My go-to is unmessed with, fairly fine-textured sea salt. What ingredient will people be talking about in five years? The world ought to be talking about water, because we are going to run out of it. That is a geopolitical answer, and I am not proposing that there wouldn’t be enough water for cooking—but water is an ingredient, and we’re going to be facing a huge problem with it soon. What is the most cherished souvenir you’ve brought back from a trip? Probably the memory of the best and most convivial meal I had on each trip—a great meal at somebody’s house or at a picnic in the woods. I’ll think, Oh that was wonderful sitting on that mountaintop, having that piece of cheese with that local bread. That peach was too hard, but it tasted great after climbing 10,000 feet. If you could invest in a dream project, what would it be? We have been approached so many times over the years to do another Zuni, but I have never been driven to do it. In so many ways, Zuni corresponds to what I always wanted out of a restaurant and it fulfills me so much. If you were going to take Thomas Keller out to eat, where would you bring him? When I lived in France I spent a lot of time not just eating in the formal Troisgros restaurant, but also with the family members. The Troisgros brothers have a sister named Madeleine who is a great cook—if she were to cook her blanquette de veau or her pot-au-feu for Tom Keller, that would be fun. What do you look for in a great wine? I like simple regional wines, I am not after the big enormous Bordeaux or Zinfandel. My taste runs to quieter, softer grapes like Pinot Noir more than Syrahs or Cabernets. And I like my whites really high-acid. What is your favorite cookbook of all time? I constantly go back to the Elizabeth David books, not to cook from but to get ideas. When I look through her books, I tend to look at whole chapters to get a sense of the whole culinary culture she’s referencing. What are your talents besides cooking? I like to garden—I do not know if I have a talent for gardening, but I certainly like it. I love to hike and climb mountains, and I think I am a very good teacher. I look at a cook who is working for me and I figure out what that person is bringing to the table in terms of information and passion. I think about how to calibrate the information and guidance I want to confer to get the best results from each individual cook. Food & Wine's Editorial Guidelines Updated on March 7, 2023 Print Rate It Share Share Tweet Pin Email Photo: Christopher Testani / Food Styling by Chelsea Zimmer / Prop Styling by Christina Daley Active Time: 20 mins Total Time: 1 hrs Yield: 4 Jump to recipe At Zuni Café in San Srancisco, the wood-burning brick oven in the center of the dining room entices diners to give in to the simple luxury of a perfectly roasted chicken. Chef Judy Rodgers, the owner of Zuni Café who died in 2013, said that the oven came first: She added the now-famous chicken to the menu to take advantage of oven space—and to challenge guests to reconsider the bird. Rodgers knew diners tended to skip chicken when they ate out because it was so ubiquitous at home. But a beautiful roast chicken was reminiscent of the food she ate during her time as an exchange student in France. She lived with chef Jean Troisgros and his family, and the meals they ate at home (and the rotisserie chickens she bought at the market) were her favorite memories. Rodgers wanted to evoke that feeling at the restaurant and garner respect for what she called “everyday, traditional food.” The recipe for Zuni Café’s Roast Chicken with Bread Salad is reliable and easy. (The hardest part is remembering to salt the chicken a day or two before you want to eat it.) The bird is succulent, with a salty, crispy skin; the bread salad is punctuated with currants and tempered with slightly bitter chicories. It’s the perfect thing to eat on a Sunday night. The dry-brining, or pre-salting, technique became synonymous with both Zuni and Rodgers; you’ll find references to Zuni-style or Judy-style chickens and turkeys all over the internet. Rodgers learned the technique in southwest France as a young cook at l’Estanquet in Les Landes. “The cook once told me to salt the sea bass that was left over at the end of the night,” Rodgers told me in a 2013 interview. “We cooked it the next day, and it was the best sea bass I’d ever had in my life. It was juicy, succulent. That principle popped out to me, that it’s juicier, not dry. Everyone thinks the key to juicy chicken is the marinade, but the only thing that gets inside the cells is salt. If you rub the herbs on the surface, you get the flavor just on the surface. But if you season chicken with salt and other aromatics together, the herbs are wrapped in the arms of the salt, and the flavor of the aromatics migrates into the meat. That’s why it gets so juicy and tender.” As we roasted and tasted Zuni chickens in the Food & Wine test kitchen, I realized how many details had been lost over the years. I had forgotten that the bread as prescribed by Rodgers in her 2002 cookbook was soft—at home, I tend to make large, crunchy croutons. At some point, I began swapping in dried cranberries for the currants, and, because a good chicory can be hard to find at my local grocer, I’d supplement the radicchio with arugula for the salad. I’ve also long since given up trying to find the three-pound chickens Rodgers advocated for using, instead settling on a four-pounder. In retesting this recipe, I was reminded of how fraught it is to keep a dish like this static. Our tastes have evolved over the past few decades, as have the size of chickens and the availability of good bread and quality greens. We can try and insist that the recipe remain the same, or we can let it change along with us—and that’s exactly what we did. Throughout it all, we asked, “How do you make something as simple as roast chicken special?” And we learned that the Zuni chicken is less of a target to hit than it is a series of lessons: The value of sourcing a small, high-quality bird to achieve the ideal ratio of skin to fat to meat. The reward that comes from pre-salting. And, perhaps most important, the necessity of honoring the integrity of a recipe while still paying attention to what works for you right now, and remembering that the simplest meals can be the most memorable. — Chandra Ram Ingredients Roast Chicken 1 (3 1/2- to 4-pound) free-range whole chicken 4 (4-inch) thyme sprigs 4 small garlic cloves, smashed and roughly chopped 3 1/2 teaspoons fine sea salt 1/4 teaspoon black pepper Bread Salad 1 tablespoon warm water (90°F to 110°F) 1 teaspoon red wine vinegar 1 tablespoon dried currants 3/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided 2 tablespoons Champagne vinegar 3/4 teaspoon fine sea salt 1/2 teaspoon black pepper 1/2 pound day-old, open-crumb, chewy, rustic bread loaf (not sourdough), cut into large (2-inch) chunks (about 2 1/2 cups) 4 medium scallions (about 2 ounces), trimmed and thinly sliced crosswise (about 3/4 cup) 3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced (about 1 tablespoon) 1 tablespoon pine nuts 4 cups lightly packed greens (such as chicory, escarole, or radicchio) (about 4 ounces) Directions Make the roast chicken: Gently loosen skin from chicken breasts and thighs using your fingers. Stuff thyme and garlic under skin, spreading in an even layer. Sprinkle salt and pepper evenly over chicken. Place chicken on a wire rack set inside a rimmed baking sheet. Refrigerate, uncovered, at least 24 hours or up to 48 hours. Make the bread salad: Preheat oven to 450°F. Stir together 1 tablespoon warm water and red wine vinegar in a small bowl; add currants, and soak until plumped, about 10 minutes. Drain currants; set aside. Whisk together 1/2 cup olive oil and Champagne vinegar in a small bowl; season dressing with salt and pepper. Toss together bread and 2 tablespoons olive oil on a rimmed baking sheet until well combined. Bake in preheated oven until lightly toasted, 8 to 12 minutes, flipping bread once halfway through baking time. Let stand on baking sheet until cool enough to handle, 5 to 10 minutes; tear bread into smaller, bite-size (1- to 1 1/2-inch) pieces. Toss bread with three-quarters of dressing (about 1/2 cup) in a large bowl, and let stand until bread absorbs liquid, about 15 minutes. Heat 1/2 tablespoon olive oil in a 10-inch cast-iron skillet over medium-low. Add scallions and garlic; cook, stirring often, until softened, about 2 minutes. Stir in pine nuts. Transfer to bowl with bread. Add currants, and toss until well combined. Spoon bread salad into a shallow 8-inch square baking dish. Cover loosely with aluminum foil; bake in preheated oven until heated through, about 15 minutes. Uncover and bake until tops of bread cubes are dry and bottoms are lightly browned, 6 to 10 minutes. Remove from oven; set aside. Increase oven temperature to 500°F. Wipe skillet clean, and transfer to oven to preheat for 8 minutes. Remove heated skillet from oven, and add remaining 11/2 tablespoons oil to hot skillet, swirling to coat. Pat chicken dry, and carefully place in skillet, breast side up. Roast at 500°F until juices run clear when a thigh is pierced using a knife and an instant-read thermometer inserted in thickest portion of breast and thigh registers at least 160°F to 165°F, 45 to 55 minutes. Transfer chicken to a cutting board, and let rest, uncovered, 10 minutes. Tilt chicken and cutting board over skillet, and drain juices into drippings. Skim fat from juices in skillet, and bring to a simmer over medium-low; stir and scrape bottom of skillet to soften any hard golden drippings using a wooden spoon, about 1 minute. Return bread salad to large bowl; drizzle with a spoonful of pan juices, and toss. Add greens and remaining 3 tablespoons dressing; fold until well combined. Cut chicken into pieces. Arrange bread salad mixture and chicken on a platter. Serve immediately. Suggested Pairing Ripe, rich Sonoma Chardonnay. Rate it Print