Patting the chicken dry

My boyfriend and I often make whole roast chicken for dinner. The chicken itself is delicious, and we often use the bones to make chicken stock, which is incredibly useful in small amounts in many other dishes that we make. We usually use a recipe from one of our cookbooks when we roast chicken at home, but recently I faced the task of cooking a whole chicken in Europe where I am cookbookless. Luckily, I have the Internet and access to a great website, epicurious.com, that has a collection of really great recipes. With the search term chicken and then refined with the term roast, I quickly came upon a recipe for roast chicken from Thomas Keller, one of America's great chefs. In Keller's recipe, he gives an explicit direction to rinse the chicken and then thoroughly pat it dry. As I recall from my cookbooks, most recipes tell you to pat the chicken dry, but I had never before comprehended the reason for this before reading Keller's recipe. He states that you want to make sure that the chicken is dry so that it doesn't steam in the oven. This makes so much sense. I'd always sort of half-heartedly patted the chicken dry before reading this recipe, but now I'm hooked on drying the chicken. From what I can tell, it produces a much crispier bird.