Zuni Chicken (Roast Chicken with Bread Salad)

At Zuni Café in San Francisco, 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