Need answer fast.
Got a couple of chickens ‘cause they were buy one get one at the store. One’s in the freezer, and one is dinner tonight. Never cooked a whole chicken before. Grilling out or rotisserie not an option – oven or slow cooker or big ol’ pot.
Recommendations?
Stuff it and roast it like a turkey.
Dismember it and fry it.
Dismember it and make any other chicken dish you would make with the pieces.
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What to do with a whole chicken?
Cross the road?
Roasting a chicken. I love this technique (a very dry roast): the chicken comes out very succulent, with a deliciously crisp skin.
You can safely ignore his advice about butter and mustard, IMO.
After we make a meal out of the roast chicken, I’ll strip the rest of the meat from the carcass, throw the carcass in a soup pot of water with salt, a few carrots, and a few stalks of celery, and simmer it gently (if you boil it hard, it’ll cloud up) for a few hours. Drain the solids off, and you’ve got an incredible broth, far tastier than storebought chicken broth.
Next day, skim the chicken fat off the broth, fry up some onions and carrots and celery in it, chop up the meat you removed and add it along with the broth, and throw in a couple handfuls of egg noodles, and you have chicken noodle soup to die for.
Sorry, should have been clear: I don’t want to cut it up and then cook it; I’ve done that before. I’m trying to do something new and different.
Yeah, rub with oil and dried herbs and some garlic and throw it in a 350 oven. There are cooking guides on the web for weight/times. For ideas, try epicurious.com or any other recipe site.
Roasting a chicken is dead-easy and delicious. This is one really easy way, from here:
That’s the super simple way, and it works. If you want to spend 5 more minutes and you have a cast iron pan, here’s another way that I really like:
I do it most often the cast-iron pan method, because it’s easy and the extra heat from the hot cast-iron lets the thighs get a little more done than the breast (which they should be). Plus, the chicken fits into the cast-iron pan just beautifully and it looks really nice and the cleanup is easy.
Yum, roast chicken…
This is my favorite recipe for roast chicken, by far. And if you choose not to ignore the mustard suggestion, Trader Joe’s makes a perfect Dijon for it.
Now I’m going to make one of these tomorrow. Maybe two.
Looks good. And I have Dijon. Thanks, LHoD!
Other suggestions still welcome, the more creative the better – I still have one in the freezer.
I am only allowed to do this to whole chickens:
1 whole roaster
4-6 medium white potatoes, peeled and sliced 1/2 inch thick
1 medium onion (white or yellow), peeled and quartered
2 carrots, peeled and cut into long narrow strips
1 or 2 ribs of celery, broken into 4 pieces
Poultry seasoning
Seasoned salt
Extra rosemary
Spray large roasting pan with PAM or other non-stick spray. Lay potato slices in an even layer in the bottom of pan. Remove giblets & neck from chicken cavity, set aside. Wash chicken inside and out. Remove excess fat deposits and pinfeathers. Put chicken on top of potatoes. Loosen breast skin and place excess chicken fat between breast meat and skin. The breast meat tends to be dry and flavorless, and this helps prevent that. Put three of the onion quarters inside main body cavity. Put other onion quarter in neck cavity. Season chicken well with poultry seasoning and seasoned salt (and extra rosemary, if desired). Put some carrot and celery pieces in each cavity, and arrange the rest of the carrot and celery pieces around chicken. Add about 1 cup of water or chicken broth. Cover. Roast at 375 F until done. I don’t know how long it takes, but I generally allow a couple of hours for this dish. I just check the meat thermometer and take the chicken out when the thermometer reads “Poultry”.
Wash neck and giblets. Put neck and giblets, except for liver, in a small saucepan with water to cover. Simmer until done. Some people add seasoning and perhaps a chopped onion, but I don’t. Use as chicken broth.
Note that I don’t use bread stuffing. If I want stuffing, I’ll cook it separately.
My husband generally doesn’t care for chicken, but he WILL eat this pot roast chicken. He’ll even request it.
For the other one (once thawed) if you have some hard, crusty bread (leftover/stale is fine!) slice thickly, and use them in the bottom of the panas a sort of ersatz roasting rack. The first time I tried it, I thought I’d died and gone to roasted chicken heaven. The bread gets AMAZING.
That’s why I put down a layer of sliced potatoes. We rarely have leftover crusty bread, but we almost always have potatoes.
I think that I’m going to try a layer of rice, next.
Kill it and eat it.
I like to crockpot it sometimes. Maybe a little bit of your fave seasonings, or just let its own juices flavor it… The white and dark meats can make a nice chicken salad, or some chimichangas, or use in chicken and dumplings, or even in a nice chicken pot chicken pot chicken pot pie.
Leave the bones and skin and juices and organ meats in the crockpot, add water to cook some more, and get a nice rich broth. When you strain it out, throw the bones and bits out by the crik for the wildlife (stray cats). Put the broth in the Frigidare and the fat will rise to the top and solidify. Some oldtimers use that fat as cooking grease, or you can throw it away, leaving you a clear (ish) broth.
Yeah, a whole chicken and a crockpot. That’s a good thing.
Stuff it and roast it.
But stuff it with a quartered lemon and as much garlic as possible.
How did it never occur to me to place the excess fat back inside the chicken?!?
That does it, I’m roasting a chicken tonight.
Why?
to die
alone
in the cold rain
Take the chicken and put it and the following in the large pierced insert of a pasta penta:
1 seriously large onion cut into quarters with a couple whole cloves stuck into the wedges
3 or 4 large carrots, scrubbed clean and cut into large pieces
the cloves from a whole bulb of garlic, peel the papery outsides off and leave them whole.
a bouquet garni [a piece of cooking gauze with a dozen whole peppercorns freshly and coarsley cracked with the back of a spoon or something not run through a grinder], 3 or 4 sprigs of thyme, 3 or 4 sprigs of parsley, 2 or 3 bay leaves tied shut and tossed into the pot
Water to cover
I tend to leave the chicken whole or just roughly hack it into quarters with kitchen scissors - no need to be particularly neat about it.
Bring to about 180F, a simmer - NOT A BOIL. simmer for 1 hour, then turn the heat off and let sit for another hour. Pull the insert out and let the broth drain back in, and let simmer to condense the broth by about half. Toss the now flavorless and yucky veggies. Pull the skin off and give it to the dog or toss it in the trash. Shred the meat off the carcass and reserve. Toss the now dead carcass, you have already made soup out of it.
You can chop the meat into smaller bits and do a couple things with it - chicken salad, add it to rice and make fried rice or some chicken and rice dish of your ethnic choice, add it back to the broth with more veggies and noodles or whatever you put into soup.
I like to use the broth by using it to make rice, or congee [a porridge of rice, chicken bits and veggies used as sick-person food in my family] or as a base for chicken noodle soup.
Put the fat between the skin of the breast and the breast. Presto, magic self-basting chicken. And you don’t need to rub the chicken with oil, or butter, or mayonnaise, either. The excess fat will drain from the bird, and you can use a gravy separator on the liquid after cooking. Potatoes and onions are delicious when fried in chicken fat, by the way.
Take it for a walk. It loves to scamper amongst the buttercups!