Cheffie Reveals his secret chicken-roasting wisdom! (carnivores and omnivores only)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Here’s my accumulated chicken-roasting wisdom. I typed it up for my sister-in-law and didn’t want it to be seen only by her.

for a whole bird, you need about half a stick of butter. soften it in the microwave for a little under a minute - you want it soft but not liquid. you can mix spices into the butter if you want.

Take your chicken and remove the neck and giblets from the body cavity - make sure there aren’t any giblets still adhering to the inside of the chicken. Rinse the bird inside and out with running water. Salt and pepper the bird inside and out.

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. Place your bird in an open roasting pan (the pan is key to a really superlative roast chicken… you want something with thick sides that allows air to circulate around the chicken while it cooks). Cut off the last joint of each wing and discard, or tuck them under; also cut away any excess fat around the body cavity opening. Take your softened butter and rub it liberally all over the chicken, paying especial attention to the breast. You may want to slide your hand under the skin of the breast area and work extra butter in between.

When the bird is well coated, turn it so it’s breast side down in the pan. Place the pan in the oven and immediately turn the heat down to 375 degrees; roast it for about an hour or an hour and a half, depending on the size of the bird. While roasting, every 20-30 minutes, baste the bird with pan drippings; each time you baste, take a spatula and loosen the chicken from the pan, sliding it around a little.

When it’s done, take it out of the pan and let it rest for ten minutes before carving. To make the gravy, pour off some of the pan juices, leaving enough to coat the bottom of the pan. Place over medium-high heat on the stovetop and sprinkle several tablespoons of flour into the pan; whisk it until it starts to cook, making sure to scrape up all the browned bits and shreds of chicken skin on the pan bottom. Then add several glugs of milk. Lower heat to medium low; whisk constantly as mixture thickens, adding milk periodically and whisking to combine until it’s the consistency you want. Season the gravy with a couple of shots of Tabasco and salt & pepper to taste.

Let me know how it goes the first time you try it!

2

What’s the next best thing to use after butter? I keep kosher (no milk and meat together!), but this sounds really good and I’d like to try it.

3

That’s about the way my Mom roasts chicken and it is veeerrry yummy. Of course, the skin is the best part. We used to get whacked with wooden spoons for trying to get at it before dinner.

Verrrry bad for my diet.

I think I’ll go to the store tomorrow and roast one for dinner tomorrow night.

4

If I weren’t able to use butter for whatever reason, my next choice would be olive oil. (you could also, of course, use schmaltz - which has a certain unity to it.) If you use olive oil, I recommend taking some cheesecloth, soaking it in olive oil, and draping it over the bird several layers thick before putting it in the oven. that will help keep the oil in place and keep the bird moist… you also won’t have to baste quite as often.

I suppose you could use margarine in a pinch, but I can’t guarantee the results.

5

Of course you’ll have to change the gravy recipe too… instead of milk, just use chicken stock. it won’t be creamy like country gravy but the flavor will still be really good.

6

I bought one of those vertical roasting things (I prefer to call it the “Chicken Impaler”) at a culinary store for about $ 3.00. Figured it was worth about what I paid. I used it to cook a whole chicken (using only a little herb rub and the butter as Chef Troy describes) and the family loved it. The great thing about whole chickens are they are so much cheaper.

7

If you use spices during the cooking, put them underneath the skin. The skin is rather loose near the opening to the cavity. The spices infuse rather well this way.

8

Alright, although you seem to have a fixation on breasts I have a question for you.
I could get this to work cut up chickens right? Sorry, it’s a visual thing that I cannot eat whole roasted chicken.
I made a cornish game hen once while pregnant and burst into tears and couldn’t eat it. Sorry, it still looks like a bird and a little one at that.

9

They sure are! I picked up three for a dinner party last Sunday (the dinner that occasioned this thread, as a matter of fact) for 49 cents a pound.

The vertical roasters (Spanek is the brand I’m familiar with) are great for the chicken, not so great for the gravy. BTW, you know what makes a great vertical roaster? An open can of beer. As the beer boils in the oven, its steam suffuses the bird and keeps it moist.

Wonko the Sane: I have seen this done with great artistry on a roast turkey… the incredibly anal person that did it had arranged whole herb leaves in a pleasing pattern on each breast, and the effect was stunning. It’s too much work for everyday if you ask me, though. I prefer to place whole herbs in the body cavity when I’m going for herb-roasted chicken, especially rosemary. Sometimes, though, you don’t want any flavors getting in the way of the pure chicken experience, and my OP is the way to get the best results in those cases.

Kricket: first of all, muchas smooches for my virtual wife. Second, I don’t know why, but no, it just doesn’t work as well. Rub whole chicken with salt, pepper and butter, cook in oven with occasional bastage, get roast chicken. Rub chicken parts with salt, pepper and butter, cook in oven with occasional bastage, get baked chicken. Sigh. I guess it’s the additional cooking surfaces that let too much moisture out or something. Oh, you’ll get tasty baked chicken, but it won’t have that indefinably superior “roasted” quality. (incidentally, if you try to reheat chicken roasted according to my OP it will also not be as good… it will have that “steamy” quality. Eat it the first time or eat it cold.)

Can’t you get Mr. Kricket to cut it up for you before you see it?

Oh, and one more thing. I like breasts a LOT, but fundamentally I’m an ass man. Y’know, in case you’re thinking of sending me naughty pix and trying to decide which group of shots to send.

10

Chef- I agree with you. sometimes you just want that yummy chicken-ness. I’m going to try your way soon, it sounds great!

Egads- a fancy pattern!

11

I won’t work as well on cut up chicken parts. Part of the glory of cooking a whole bird is that the juices stay inside. If you use chicken parts, it’s more likely to dry out.

When I roast a bird, I take two or three heaping tablespoonsfull of crushed garlic, mix those with rosemary, sage, a little tarragon, and black pepper, and mix that with a half cup or so each of lemon juice and soy sauce.

That whole mixture is the poured under the bird’s skin, at eight spots (all combinations of ventral/dorsal, posterior/anterior, and left/right) making sure to get the mixture under the skin in the thighs when you do ventral-posterior. Leftover mixture can be dripped inside the body cavity. The effect is to make sure the flavor is cooked into the meat, rather than having tasty skin and boring meat.

The outside is coated with soy sauce, olive oil, and sprinkled with the above-named spices. It turns crispy and really tasty.

I generally chop up piles of potatoes (fairly thin) and let them soak in the drippings, making sure to pour a little extra oil/soy/spices on them and stir occaisionally to make sure they’re coated. They turn dark brown and my relatives fight over every last little piece.

BTW, when making the gravy, if you’re worried about lumps, instead of adding flour to the drippings, add a bit of the drippings to the flour, make a paste, and then gradually add the rest of the liquid, stirring briskly. This is useful for many things, like mixing dry spices and liquid (as done above), mixing wasabi and soy, etc.

12

Oh, I already know what group of pix to send you.

I guess I could have him take it apart for me like I was five.
So, after all this I went down to the kitchen and started my famous lemon garlic BAKED chicken.
See what you started?

13

Now K-baby, I’m not talking about cutting it up into bites on your plate… I’m just talking about cutting the chicken into serving pieces and/or removing all the meat from the bones and arranging it on a platter (which is what I did on Sunday).

and what’s the big hold-up if you know what pix to send me? You KNOW what a connossieur of fine art photography I am. Don’t leave me hangin.

14

I like to pack herbs and garlic slices under the skin and inject the chicken everywhere with both melted butter and white wine. Rub the outside with butter or oil and coat with spices. Whole small onions (vidalia when in season) get packed into the cavity. Roast breast side down until the last 15 minutes, then breast side up and high heat to crisp the skin. And roast chicken is nothing…NOTHING… without giblet gravy!

On the grill, the beer can is the ultimate.