These days, we don’t have much need to confit, originally developed as a way to preserve meat before the advent of refrigeration. The basic technique is to salt cure a piece of meat for a day or so, slowly cook it in fat (preferably fat of the type of animal that’s being cooked) and then store it submerged in that very fat. But life would be fairly boring if we only stuck to what modern convenience required and the combination of curing and slow cooking in fat provides just too perfect a launching point for a blog called Salt and Fat.

Unlike my partner, I decided to launch with an experiment that I’d never tried before. I wanted to introduce the idea of a confit but thought the traditional duck or goose might be a bit off-putting to folks more accustomed to neighborhood grocery stores instead of butchers or specialty markets. So I thought a chicken, the mainstay of the modern American diet, might be fun to try. And since chicken fat is fairly difficult to come by, and undesirable to boot, I figured a bottle of olive oil, another fixture in every cabinet, would work as a suitable stand in. I also threw in a few herbs and spices that should be easy to come by.

For my experiment, I picked up a cellophane-wrapped “best of fryers” from my neighborhood market (locally raised to boot), an already butchered set of two wings, two breasts, two legs and two thighs, skin on, for a grand total of just under six bucks. I grabbed a bottle of nothing-fancy olive oil — no need to splurge on extra virgin, in fact you might want the richer, heavier flavor of a second or third pressing. If you don’t have any kosher salt, grab a box while you’re in the store (I like Morton’s) and throw out your table salt while you’re at it. I included some peppercorns and a clove of garlic.

Back home, I coated the chicken in about 2-3 tablespoons of salt — it should have a noticeable patina on every surface. Once coated, everything got shoved into a non-reactive pan — a 9x13 pyrex baking dish fit things snuggly. A healthy sprinkle of coarsely ground pepper on top, pressed the thinly sliced slivers of garlic directly into the meat, covered in food safe plastic and into the fridge it went overnight. To keep the final chicken from being too salty, rinse the salt and seasonings the next morning.

Next, the fat. Preheat your oven to 200 (or lower if yours will do it). You’ll need a pot or pan that can safely go in the oven (so nothing with plastic handles) — a cast iron oven works great for this. Pat the rinsed chicken dry, dump it in your pot in a single layer or two, cover completely in the olive oil (I used a full bottle) and bring to simmer on the stove over medium high heat. Once you start to see some bubbles in the oil, turn off the stove and put the pot, uncovered, in the oven. For, oh, about four to six hours — this is best done on windy, rainy or snowy Saturday when sticking around the house and heating up the kitchen is a fairly appealing notion.

At this point, the chicken should be quite tender, probably falling apart. Let the whole thing cool at room temperature and then you can either transfer the meat and oil to tupperware or just stick the whole pot in the fridge. It’s imperative that the meat stay submerged in the oil — it will stay good for weeks this way. You can reheat by heating some of the olive oil over medium heat and frying the meat, skin side down, for 4-5 minutes — this goes pretty well on with some braised greens or on top of a salad with, say, a light vinaigrette.

As for whether the experiment worked, I’d say it was a noble effort if not something I’m going to add to my repertoire. For one, I prefer to avoid cooking with olive oil, as its low smoke point means its flavor changes when heated. But mostly I just didn’t feel like the chicken was transformed in the same way that a duck, goose or (best yet) pork are when put through the same alchemy; duck fat or lard may have been a better substitute for the olive oil, but I’m worried the chicken wouldn’t hold up to such strong stuff. It was good, and certainly different than the boring seared chicken breast at the heart of the American diet, but it didn’t blow me away.