CHICKEN JUS

THE FRENCH WORD JUS TRANSLATES AS "juice" and refers to a light sauce for meat that is made from pan drippings produced by roasting. Once the roast is removed from the pan, the pan is placed on top of the stove. An aromatic (usually onion) is cooked briefly in the drippings and the pan is then deglazed with a liquid, usually stock. This kind of sauce is generally not thickened with flour or another starch, but it may be enriched with a little butter. The idea is to capture the natural flavor of the meat in a quick, light sauce.

Many cooks may associate the term jus with roast beef. At Cook's we prefer a thickened gravy with roast beef. Since roast beef creates very few pan drippings, beef jus (as prepared in many restaurants) derives most of its flavor from homemade veal stock or demi-glace, which is usually made from highly concentrated veal or beef stock and wine. Substitute canned broth (as most home cooks are likely to do), and the resulting jus is harsh and not terribly beefy.

A chicken jus is another matter. A roast chicken creates enough drippings, especially if you tilt the chicken as you remove it from the roasting pan and let the juices from the body cavity run out. Our goal here was to turn these drippings into a sauce that really tastes like chicken. We had two main questions: Should the pan juices be defatted, and what liquid is best for deglazing?

For our first test, we roasted a chicken and did not defat the pan drippings. The jus was disappointing. Excess fat seemed to dilute the chicken flavor, and the excess fat had caused the drippings to burn in the pan. These burned drippings gave the sauce a harsh quality that was unwelcome. Some or all of the fat had to go.

For our next test, we pulled excess fat from both the body and neck cavities of the bird before roasting. When the bird was done, there was far less fat in the pan drippings. We then ladled off all but the sheerest film of the remaining fat. The finished jus was thin (one taster commented that it "fell off the chicken meat") and not very flavorful.

Clearly, some sort of middle ground was needed. For our next test we still removed excess fat from the cavities before roasting, but this time we left a decent amount of fat in the drippings. (Although measurements here tend to be imprecise, we left three tablespoons of drippings in the pan, and fat accounted for about half of that volume.) We then sautéed an onion in the drippings and deglazed the pan with canned broth. This jus was excellent. There was enough fat to give the sauce body. The balance of fat to pan juices was just right, and the chicken flavor was strong.

We then tested several methods for removing excess fat from the pan drippings. When we tried a gravy separator, we found that many of the browned bits ended up stuck inside of the separator and were lost. The jus made with drippings defatted this way was less flavorful.

In the end, we found it best to tilt the roasting pan so that the drippings flowed into one corner. With a small ladle (the kind you might use to pour pancake batter) or a large dinner spoon, simply skim off the fat that rises to the surface. We found that a small chicken (weighing between 3¹/₂ and 4 pounds) produces an average ¹/₂ cup pan drippings, provided that excess fat has been pulled out of the cavities before cooking. This means that you should be able to spoon off 4 or 5 tablespoons of fat to yield the 3 tablespoons of partially defatted pan drippings needed for the jus.

Canned chicken broth worked well as the deglazing liquid, but we wondered if other liquids would be appropriate. After numerous tests, we found that chicken broth did the best job of emphasizing the natural chicken flavor in the jus but that lemon juice, white wine, and orange juice can be used to add another flavor dimension. The choice of deglazing liquid is a matter of personal preference and may depend on what else is being served.

Many chef cookbooks suggest straining the finished jus before serving. While this step might make a more refined sauce, we found that the flavor suffers a bit and there's no need to dirty a strainer and bowl.