The Perdue Chicken Cookbook | Page 5

and hundreds of
taste testings for Perdue products. Everywhere he goes, people know he
likes chicken and the best chefs and hostesses in the world have served
it to him." In my mind I ran through some of the times when together
we'd driven an hour out of the way to go to a restaurant that cooked
chicken particularly well, and how he always seemed to have lists of
the restaurants he wanted to visit. Help! My stage fright was getting
still worse. The thirty year old oven didn't seem to be heating right, but
I couldn't be sure because there wasn't any oven thermometer. The
"elbow test," which our grandmothers used to use before the days of
thermometers (you stick your elbow in the oven and feel how hot it is),
told me that things weren't right, but I didn't know how far off the oven
was so I didn't know how to compensate. As I rubbed my elbow with
my other hand, I thought of Frank's reputation for being demanding. If
you've seen the ad that we call "Boot Camp," you know what I mean.
(He plays the part of a drill sergeant in this ad and teaches the new
Perdue recruits the 57 quality points that they have to inspect -- and
then he's all over one recruit for missing what seems like an invisibly
small hair.) It's a funny thing, but when you start losing your
confidence, you start asking some basic questions about what you're
doing. Part of me was saying that cooking chicken is pretty simple;
after all, I'd been doing it for most of my life. But another part of me
realized when attempting to cook chicken for Frank the first time, that I
knew very little of the basics of cooking chicken. Like, for example,
what makes a chicken tender? How do you really know when it's
done$and not over done? How do you get the best flavor? Should you
salt before or after cooking? In desperation, I made a two-part promise
to myself. First, I'd let myself take the easy way out that first meal, and

not even try to cook the chicken myself. Instead, dinner would be a
never-fail salad, pasta (Frank loves pasta), plus store-bought
fully-cooked Perdue Tenders. In return for letting myself off so easily,
I'd make it my business from then on to learn how to make the best
chicken every time. That meant asking Frank every question that
popped into my head; checking with the food technologists who work
for Perdue; getting tips from the farmers who grew the Perdue chickens;
and systematically going through the thousands of recipes that Frank
has in his files, trying a different one each night. Dinner that night
wasn't the show piece I would have liked to create, but it was good
enough and Frank happens to love his own Tenders so the chicken part
of the meal was a success. In the time since, I've tried to live up to the
second part of the promise, the one about learning how to serve the best
chicken every time. In this book, I'd like to share with you the most
useful cooking tips and the most appealing, most successful recipes
developed by Perdue Farms over the last twenty years. The first chapter
contains the kinds of information I wished I'd known from the
beginning. You don't need to read this chapter, because chicken isn't
that hard to cook; but there are tips in it that can save you time and
money and that can enable you to cook with greater confidence. This
chapter also has the latest tips on food safety. The remaining chapters
are organized, not by method of cooking or whether the food is an
appetizer or salad or whatnot; but rather by the kind of occasion you're
facing. You want to put some spark and variety into every day meals?
You want to make the most of your microwave? Or you're in a hurry
today? Maybe you need something that will please kids? Or you're
dieting? You've got a bunch of leftovers? You have to cook for a
hundred people tomorrow night? I tried to think of the kinds of
situations in which you could need recipes and then I organized Frank's
recipes around them. Jean Brillat- Savarin, the famous French gourmet,
once said, "A chicken to a cook is like a canvas to a painter." Enjoy the
recipes and tips that follow, and may they help you to feel the creativity
and confidence that make cooking fun and eating a joy!

YOU DON'T HAVE TO WING IT! LET FRANK TAKE YOU
UNDER HIS. Everything You Wanted or Needed to Know about
Cooking Chicken

Frank gets roughly 40,000 consumer letters a year. Half of these are
requests for