Roast Chicken

It snowed over two feet this weekend. I still can’t believe it. That’s the second time this winter we’ve been buried in the white stuff and it’s been years since we’ve seen any significant snow in Philadelphia. On Friday I went to the South Street Whole Foods around 1 p.m., assuming that people would be, you know, working, and it would be a relatively sane trip. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Lines stretched back to the frozen food case, in other words, lines ran the whole length of the store. I tried to imagine what would be my ideal snowed in dinner, and two words came to mind: roast chicken.

For me, the classic supper has a mystique about it. It’s the kind of meal families on TV had, an edible emblem of the functional American family. I certainly never laid eyes on a real roast chicken dinner growing up. I still vividly remember the first roast chicken I ever loved. It was at Southwark restaurant, and the half bird was wrapped in its crackling mahogany skin; its juicy meat perfectly seasoned and more purely chickeny than anything I ever tasted.

I have to admit that I’ve given up on reproducing that skin at home. I’ve tried; I’ve set off the fire alarm; I’ve badly overcooked expensive organic birds; I’ve come tantalizing close. But it’s no longer worth the frustration. (Besides, Dan has taken to carefully removing the not-quite-crisp skin and then crisping it in the oven after the fact … perhaps he’ll describe this in the comments.)

Here’s my current, fuss-free method, inspired by Jamie Oliver’s version in Jamie’s Food Revolution.

1 whole free-range chicken, 3 to 4 pounds, rinsed and thoroughly dried
3 medium carrots, coarsely chopped
1 medium onion, coarsely chopped
1/4 cup olive oil, divided
1 lemon, halved
1 handful assorted fresh herbs (I used thyme and sage)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 475 degrees.

Arrange the vegetables in the bottom of a roasting pan, drizzle with 2 tablespoons of olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Put the bird on top of the vegetables, breast side up, and coat with the remaining olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. Stuff the cavity with the lemon and herbs.

This is optional, but I like to truss the bird. Trussing sounds like a fancy and precise technique, but it just means gathering the bird up in a more solid mass for even cooking. You want the legs pulled together and the wings as close as can be to the bird. We recently acquired these handy little numbers (you may have been wondering what the bird was bound up with in the photo) for the job, and they make trussing extra easy. The only thing to keep in mind is that a trussed bird takes longer to cook.

Put the prepared chicken in the oven, and immediately turn down the oven to 400 degrees. The bird will need to roast until the juices run clear when you tip him a bit or the thickest part of the thigh reads 170 degrees. Depending on the size of the bird, whether you’ve trussed, and your oven, this might take anywhere from 50 minutes to an hour and a half. Sorry! My trussed chicken weighed four pounds and took about an hour and 20 minutes.

But … we accidentally overcooked it a bit. I put blind faith in my instant read thermometer, and somehow I accidentally switched it over to Celsius. We could not figure out why on earth it was reading only 70 degrees. We put it in the oven for an extra 15 minutes when it was already 158 degrees. Whoops.

You know what, though? The chicken was delicious. When you cook meat on the bone and under the skin, it is substantially protected from the drying out that so often happens to boneless, skinless chicken breasts. We each had a leg (my favorite part) and half a breast, plus roasted potato wedges and homemade mayo. I whisked the strained and de-fatted roasting juices into a cup of frozen gravy base I had defrosted. (Frozen gravy is another post … it’s essentially chicken stock thickened up with a roux.)

After dinner, I picked the chicken carcass clean, shredding all the meat. I had about 3 cups of meat leftover and I’ll use it for the Serious Eats recipe I’m developing this week and chicken salad for lunch. I saved the neck, wings, leg and thigh bones, and the carcass for a future stock. Using every bit of my fancy free range chicken lets me get the most for my money and avoid waste, two values that are fundamental to the way we like to cook and eat.