There are plenty of reasons people love — and justify having spent $400 on — their Dyson Supersonic Hair-Dryer. The Allure Best of Beauty and Readers' Choice winner has the fastest digital motor on the market, is super ergonomic, and is quieter than most conventional hair-dryers, to name just a few. And now, you can add a crispy finish to the list of reasons why you may want one for yourself. No, it won't leave your hair crispy — it will apparently give roasted chicken skin an incredibly delicious texture.
Food writer Helen Rosner welcomed her Twitter followers to join her on a pretty unique cooking journey earlier this week, posting, "Happy snow day, I am using an astonishingly expensive hair-dryer to remove all moisture from a chicken to maximize skin crispiness when I roast it," accompanied by a photo of her doing exactly that. The astonishingly expensive hair-dryer in question? Why, the Dyson Supersonic, of course.
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She shared the recipe and photos of the finished meal, and I have to admit, it sounds and looks amazing. But given my affinity for all things beauty, I just had to ask her how she came up with the idea of using the Dyson Supersonic as a cooking apparatus.
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"Marcella Hazan was definitely the progenitor of the idea," Rosner tells Allure, referring to the late cookbook queen who reportedly came up with the concept of using a hair-dryer during meat preparation back in the 1970s. She continues, saying, "But it also owes a little bit to Alton Brown — he famously has a recipe for homemade beef jerky that uses a box fan, which stuck in my head. For crisp skin, whether you're cooking a chicken or a duck or a fish, you want there to be as little water moisture as possible, which is sped up by a fan. And that's all a hair-dryer really is — a hand-held fan that you can pretty easily bring into the kitchen."
You can have a glittery pink manicure and cook a fucking terrific roast chicken.
Although the idea of using a fan has been stuck in Rosner's head for a while, she originally purchased the Dyson Supersonic for her head, not for cooking. "I wish I could say I got it for cooking, but it started out life as a hair-only appliance," Rosner explains. "A year or two ago I started getting very sensitive to how loud my old T3 hair-dryer was, so to avoid hearing loss, I started wearing earplugs when I dried my hair, which was a spectacularly huge pain in the ass. I read that the Dyson was way quieter than other dryers, so honestly, that's why I bought it. And it is quieter! The fact that it's way, way, way better at drying my hair than any other dryer I've tried is just a bonus. The fact that it helps my roast chicken be so great is a double bonus."
Ah, but is it better at chicken-crisping than it is at hair-drying? Not exactly. "You could use any hair-dryer on the chicken — even one that doesn't have a 'cool' setting, though it'll smell a little chickeny while you heat-style it," she explains, basically giving us all permission to start keeping an inexpensive hair-dryer in the kitchen exclusively for culinary purposes. She's far more likely to commit to the Dyson for beauty purposes, however. "As for my hair, I can definitely feel the downgrade when I use any other dryer now."
Understandably, Rosner has gotten a pretty huge response to her cooking method, with more than 1,600 people liking her initial dryer tweet and a subsequent essay about the process in The New Yorker, her usual food-writing stomping grounds. However, some Twitter users made some pretty ridiculous (condescending and arguably misogynistic) comments. "A lot of the most frustrating replies were from people who seemed to think I was using the dryer to cook the chicken, not to dry it — people being like, 'Honey, that's what the oven is for' — which, to be honest, tells me a lot about their own kitchen skills if they don't know how important it is to dry chicken before putting it in the oven. I love when that happens: people revealing their own ignorance by inaccurately pointing out mine."
I wish I could say I got it for cooking, but it started out life as a hair-only appliance.
She continues, "In the photo that I posted, you can see my thumb holding the dryer, and I think my manicure didn't do me any favors with that crowd. (Shoutout to Paintbox Soho, by the way — their gel manis are so amazing that I can be elbow-deep in a chicken and never worry about anything flaking off.) But I'm 100 percent sure that if the picture showed a gnarly dude hand with hairy knuckles, the same people treating me like a ditzy idiot would be losing their goddamn minds over this epic kitchen hack, or whatever. Like, 'Finally, my bro, your wife's hair-dryer is good for something!' You know what? You can have a glittery pink manicure and cook a fucking terrific roast chicken. I do it all the time. If people can't see past that, it's their loss."
Fuck yes, Helen Rosner.
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