Rotisserie chicks turn into savory savor faire

Remember when rotisserie chickens were as dodgy as mini-mart hot dogs?

Wizened, radiantly orange beneath glowing heat lamps, spinning lamely on spits within foil-lined supermarket display cases. Nobody but desperate bachelors or ravenous drunks would dare buy one.

Nowadays a whole new generation of rotisserie chickens radiates a kind of glamour. Not simply a convenience for overcommitted two-job families, the best spit-roasted chickens have the sheen of free-range, grain-fed Euro-chic. The East Bay's most authentically European rotisserie birds come from vans topped with garish fiberglass chickens, like huge, bumpy footballs sprouting drumsticks.

It's not exactly the ambience of the little father-and-son rotisserie that cranked up its spits every morning outside the apartment building where I stayed in Paris last year. But RoliRoti's chickens actually taste better than those Parisian birds I recall.

Thomas Odermatt launched RoliRoti three years ago with a simple business plan: to spit-roast the perfect chicken in mobile rotisseries, and sell it at farmers markets. Odermatt grew up in Switzerland and has a master's degree from the University of Zurich in environmental management, a fancy way of saying organic agriculture. Naturally, he considered finding the right chicken crucial: tasty, unsullied by chemicals or animal byproducts, and above all, local.

In other words, a chicken just like ones raised in Europe. In the end, he settled on free-range, corn-fed birds from Fulton Valley Farms in Sonoma County. "The fat underneath the skin is very, very important," says Odermatt.

Fat melts into the flesh of a slowly cooked bird, rendering it juicy without having to pump it up with brine. (To taste the difference, pick up one of the brine-injected rotisserie chickens from the Richmond Costco deli: The meat is salty, and the dark meat has a flabby texture like rare roast beef. The texture is so engineered, so industrial, that it can strike you as eerie.) The flavor of a RoliRoti bird is rich and deeply layered, nicely weedy from a whole lot of thyme and rosemary.

White meat is tricky with rotisserie chickens -- it dries out before the denser flesh of leg and thigh is done. A RoliRoti breast is compact, but the dark meat is perfectly moist, its color a soft apple-blossom pink. That's a sign of just how slowly it's cooked. A whole bird weighs approximately 3 pounds and sells for $11. You can get red-skinned potatoes, too, roasted on a griddle underneath the twirling spits. The ones I tasted were just barely cooked, and not quite crusty -- if you do get them, try crisping them at home in a big skillet, over low heat for about 30 minutes.

Chow chickens: You can find those same Fulton Valley chickens on the small, French-made rotisserie at the market annex at Chow, the bustling Lafayette restaurant. Chow's chickens are delicious. You wouldn't expect anything less, considering the kitchen roasts only about 20 a day. Executive chef Jeff Amber says that's all his cooks can handle, given demand at the perpetually jammed restaurant. Chickens come off the spits twice a day, at about noon and 5 p.m. A 21/2-pound bird costs $7.95. Amber's cooks fill the chickens with garlic cloves, lemon halves and thick knots of fresh rosemary. They rub the skins with extra-virgin olive oil, ground toasted fennel seed, cumin and coriander, and let the spices penetrate overnight.

"It makes the taste really floral," says Amber.

And it creates handsome golden-russet patches on the skin. The flavor is golden, too: warm, rich and aromatic. The breast meat is white and flaky, slightly drier than the RoliRoti bird. But the dark meat is delicious, suffused with the warmth of rosemary. It's a chicken I'd be happy to eat most nights.

Six chix: Rosemary is just the beginning at Whole Foods Market in Walnut Creek, where the prepared foods department features a wall of chickens revolving on spits -- six flavors to choose from, roasted continuously all day. Rosemary-Garlic, Lemon-Herb, Herbes de Provence: It's a Starbucks menu of rotisserie chicken, half a dozen flavorful, luscious-sounding rubs that make the birds underneath seem almost irrelevant. But they're pedigreed birds, free-range Rocky Jr.'s, without growth hormones or antibiotics. The simplest Whole Foods bird is the so-called classic ($6.95 per pound), a 11/2-pound fryer rubbed with olive oil, sea salt and pepper.

It smells deliciously burnt, like the tip of a Thanksgiving drumstick. But the breast is disappointingly dry, with a texture that reminds you of stale angel food cake. Try to cut it thin with a steak knife and it shreds like cardboard under a buzz saw. The thigh is only slightly better. To be fair, I have no idea how long the chicken I tasted was sitting on a self-serve warming shelf, inside its domed plastic container. But it really shouldn't matter.

Sadly, those RoliRoti chickens are elusive for us in Contra Costa County. For a brief period in 2004, Thomas Odermatt set up one of his chicken-topped vans at the Walnut Creek farmers' market, but county health rules have prevented him from returning without making dramatic modifications.

For now, you'll have to travel to the Saturday market at San Francisco's Ferry Plaza, to the Grand Lake market in Oakland, also on Saturdays, or to Alameda on Tuesdays. It's a bit of a schlep, but hey -- Oakland's a lot closer than Paris.

Reach East Bay food writer John Birdsall at jwbirdsall@earthlink.net