Can you shove a beer can up a chicken’s butt just like with the turkey? I hear that’s a taste treat delight.
What’s the consensus on stuffing? Should a chicken be roasted with or without? And should it be a plain breadcrumb stuffing, or what?
Whenever we had turkey for Thanksgiving or Christmas, my Mom used to boil the neck and giblets, chop them up, and put them in the gravy (also putting the broth in the gravy). Does anybody do this with a chicken?
Thanks, y’all, for your sage (ha!) advice. I’m going to try brining. But can I say that I’m surprised no one expressed a preference for a particular chicken brand? Or even a particular type – organic, grain-fed, free-range, etc.?
I do my grocery shopping (about 95% of it) at Trader Joes so I generally buy their “young, fresh chicken.” I prefer a smaller bird. I’ve been eating organic meat for so long I guess I don’t mention it anymore. Hey, I’ve heard that you shouldn’t brine a kosher bird, though, because it’s already salt treated? Maybe someone can confirm or deny.
Although, to tell you the truth, I like cornish rock hens the best, which are just baby chickens. I’m not a big fan of leftover roast chicken…it has a smell to it that I don’t like and it’s too greasy for my tastes. I prefer it to just get eaten that day and a cornish rock hen provides the perfect quantity for a couple of people.
Once you go brine, you never go back. Or something.
I confess I buy chicken when it’s on sale; I never notice a brand. But if I had to stop and think, my favorite kind of chicken is duck.
I see one mention of butterflying a chicken, but I’d like to formally recommend this method, especially for a beginner.
To butterfly, or spatchcock, a chicken involves removing its back, breaking some of the joints by hand, and flattening the chicken such that its skin is on top, and the inside of what used to be the cavity of the chicken is now on “bottom” – such as it is, for it’s roasted skin-side up in a shallow pan, perhaps on top of some root vegetables, a rack, or however you like it.
I believe it’s dramatically easier to prepare a satisfactory roast chicken in this way than in the manner dictated by tradition – i.e., trussing the chicken in its comparatively natural state. The chicken will not, obviously, be the sort of thing you’d carve at the table as in a Norman Rockwell painting.
Otherwise, I like what’s already been written. Especially the turning of the chicken periodically. I personally would recommend browning the skin first, before cooking the meat as you prefer, and I would not consider roasting a chicken in a deep roasting pan, at least without a good rack. Even a jellyroll pan should work OK. Brine or don’t, use whatever herbs you like, it doesn’t really matter once you’ve got some practice with the actual cooking method under your belt. The method itself is, in contrast to the OP, really nothing more than putting the bird in a hot oven. The rest is incidental, in my opinion.
Nobody has an opinion on stuffing? Or giblet gravy?
Sure, why not? I like to eat stuffing, but I don’t believe it’s possible to cook the perfect chicken when it’s packed tight with bread and other sundries. I think you can get very close to good results, though – but why bother? It turns roast chicken from a very SIMPLE process to a complex process, requiring vastly more attention from the cook, and yields inferior results to boot.
Giblet gravy is excellent, however – no need for a lesson on that, particularly. Just cut them up and get makin’.
Get a probe thermometer – that’s the one bit of equipment that makes roasting meats truly simple.
On the very first try, I believe the OP will be roasting a chicken just as good or better than anything ready for purchase in any restaurant. It’s just not that hard to do.
I tend to agree. Roasting a chicken for me is an easy & satisfying meal, without much work. Stick the chicken in a 350-400 degree oven, wait an hour to an hour and a half, and it’s done. Golden brown, crunchy skin, juicy meat. I don’t brine. Tried it, didn’t like it. I get enough sodium in my diet.
No opinion on stuffing. I don’t make it. If I did make it, I wouldn’t stick it in the chicken. Stovetop stuffing, baby!
I may or may not make giblet gravy, depending how lazy I’m feeling. If I were, here’s basically what I do:
Take out my 3 qt glass baking dish, it’s about 9’X13". Cut a couple lemons in half. Chop up some carrots, onions & potatoes into large chunks. Fill the baking dish with the veggies. Drizzle a little olive oil on them, squeeze half the lemons’ juice over them, and sprinkle whatever spices you like. Your regular Italian herbs are always good. Mix it all up so everything’s coated.
Remove the giblets from chicken, set aside.
In a measuring cup or bowl, squeeze out the rest of the lemon juice. Add a little olive oil, and more of whatever spices you’re going for. This mixture shouldn’t amount to more than 1/8 to 1/4 cup. After drying off your chicken, slather this mixture all over it. Stuff the now juiced lemon halves into the chicken. Place the chicken on top of the veggies in the baking dish. I don’t bother tying off the chicken. I just make a little bed for it on top of the veggies. The wings get kinda crunchy, but I don’t mind. Bake that chicken!
Put the giblets in a small saucepan, add a couple cups of water and simmer while the chicken’s cooking. You can add some veggies & garlic if you want. After awhile, take the giblets out, let them cool, scrape off whatever meat you can get from the neck, chop everything finely & return it to the original water in the saucepan. If you’re boiling veggies in this, strain/mash them through a fine mesh strainer and discard the remnants before returning the giblets to this water. Continue simmering and add more water if it’s getting too thick. When the chicken’s done, there should be some nice pan-juice. Add some of that to the giblets, bring it back to a simmer and wisk a little cornstarch into it until it’s how you like your gravy.
There. My $.02. Most of the time though, I just boil the giblets and give them to the cat.
Stuffing a chicken just isn’t worth it. The cavity’s too small for a reasonable amount to fit, and there’s not enough fat in the chicken to really moisten and make the stuffing extra yummy. Plus, there’s that whole foodborne illness issue.
Per AB, if you insist on stuffing your chicken, wrap the stuffing in cheescloth or a cloth bag, then nuke it for 12 minutes on high before sliding the bag into the bird. This cooks the stuffing hot enough to kill the sallmonella on the inside of the bird.
But I prefer either baking stuffing next to the bird in its own loaf pan, or stovetop stuffing. Yeah, I even like the stovetop stuffing from a box. Sue me.
Giblet gravy’s not my thing.
One more appeal for dryness techniques. Please…? I like a very dry white meat, which I like to smother in gravy. But most microwave chicken is so moist it drips. I would cook my own if I knew how to make it dry.
Have you tried just continuing to cook it until it’s dry? I mean, when you poke it and (yellowish) juices run out you could try cooking it a little longer, until they don’t. Another thing they say NOT to do because it will dry out the meat is to cut it up immediately. (You’re supposed to wait for the juices to settle so they won’t all run out and cause the meat to go dry.) So you could keep that in mind as well.
My own request to ** Cheez_Whia**:
more info on the home rotisserie, please? Expensive? Noisy? Clumsy? Hard to clean?
I keep thinking we should get one of those…
Aw, hell, you were serious? :eek:
Just overcook it. Don’t turn or rotate or use a fancy roaster. Leave it in the oven too long. Take the skin off first if you like.
blech.
I can’t believe I’m enabling you.
I must go wash my soul.
(I’lll have you know, even the SDMB hamsters are trying to save you from yourself. This timed out 4 times before I could preview it!)
Definitely do not brine a kosher bird. You’re right, it’s basically already brined.
Just cook it till it’s dry. I cook my fried chicken that way - I hate juicy, runny fried chicken; it feels not-done to me. Just cook it until most people would say it’s done, then keep cooking until it’s dry. My roast chicken, actually, isn’t juicy per se. It’s moist and tender (not dry and tough) because of the cooking method, but no liquid running out of it.
I got mine out of a cookbook I received for Christmas.
None of this namby-pamby 350-400 degrees. Five hundred. You heard me. That point on your dial just before it gets to “Destroy With Fire”.
Take a chicken. Stuff a lemon cut into eighths, a half an onion cut into the same sort of wedges, and maybe some rosemary or some other nice aromatic herb. Season the skin with lemon pepper.
Put this chicken into a very heavy baking dish. I have a cast-iron Dutch oven I use for this purpose. Don’t bother covering it.
Stuff into the 500 degree oven. Listen to it scream.
About ten or fifteen minutes later, use a spatula to loosen the bird from the bottom so that it doesn’t cook onto the pan.
It usually takes about an hour, give or take, though you’ll want to test the temperature. If you aren’t careful the edges might blacken, but for most chickens there’s a ‘sweet spot’ where the skin is perfectly brown and the inside is perfectly done. You get very, very little juice in the bottom of the pan, and the chicken meat itself is surprisingly rich.
I make stuffing in a separate pan, if I make it at all. Sometimes I use a mix, sometimes I make homemade stuffing. Stuffing a chicken is just an exercise in futility. I usually do make giblet broth, and some of it goes to making gravy, and a lot of it goes towards making the soup. As far as my family is concerned, there’s no point in baking a chicken if we’re not gonna have chicken ‘n’ dumplings or chicken soup the next day.
Ronco Showtime Rotisseries available here. My sister picked up the one she gave to me at a yard sale for 25 bucks. The knob was broken, and I replaced it from the same site as above. I think I have seen them at Wal-Mart or other stores.
It makes a little sqeaking noise if you don’t remember to spray the rotation point with some Pam, but otherwise all you hear is the electric motor. I don’t find it any harder to clean up than what you would have with a regular roast chicken. It makes a great roast beef, too. I can get a smallish eye of round roast medium rare with a good brown coating without having to brush the outside of the meat with fat. It does hot dogs pretty well, also. Another plus for me: it doesn’t heat up the whole kitchen in the summertime (my kitchen faces west). I also like the elastic band thingies that come with it to truss the chicken. So easy. I’m currently out, and the chicken I made last week, I had to truss with string. Not so easy. Gotta order more of those!
Hope this helps!
That helps a lot. Thank you for responding.