Your FAVORITE roast chicken recipe

[kiliki]

Marcella's lemon chicken used to be my favorite but these days I'm partial to the Cook's Illustrated butterflying/high heat version, in which you brine, butterfly, stuff a compound butter (I like their chipotle/garlic/lime/honey butter) and roast the chicken at 500 degrees. Best crispy skin EVER. Although recently I made Lynn Rosetto Kaspar's balsemic/pancetta roast chicken (from The Italian Country Table) and it was delicous.

[jgould]

however it is that l'ami louis in paris makes their roast chicken has got to be a favorite of anyone who has ever had!!!!!

[sassybat]

my current method is slathering the bird with a mixture of chopped garlic, rosemary, salt, pepper, and olive oil and roasting it at 400 degrees until it's done. but after reading this topic i might have to experiment with other methods.....

i see a lot of roast chicken in my future.

as for accompaniments, i'm all for mashed potatoes and some kind of yummy veg, but last night i made roast chicken with herbed rice and roasted cauliflower. it was good, but i kind of forgot about the cauliflower for a little while and they ended up being browner (and slightly more burnt) than i would normally let them get. still good though.

[Pere Hugo]

My latest is piri-piri-ed. Got tired of reheated, dry birds from our local Portuguese Chias so did some research and came up with a marinade of olive oil, cider vinaigre, salt, hot red peppers and garlic. I cut a chicken in half and marinade for a few hours at least, then lay it in the pan with some bay leaves and roast for about 1 1/2 hours at 375 to 400. Let it rest for 1/2 hour, then scarf with extra marinade.

Sometimes stick some small potatoes around the chicken for the last hour or so. Yum.

Now I can't wait to try it grilled in the spring.

[saturnbar]

There is a place of legendary stature down here (New Orleans) just outside of town that serves a dish they call Chicken al la grande. I am not sure it falls squarley into the category of roasted chicken, anyway, they cut up a whole chicken, not into the normal pieces, leg, thigh, breast, etc., but into much smaller units, with the bone, and then either pan or oven fry it all in a ton of olive oil, garlic and rosemary. There is no batter or breadcrumbs mind you. I would say it is something akin to a confit, although there is much more carmelization. There is hardly a soul in New Orleans that hasn't been to Mosca's, and everyone has chicken al la grande, and of course, oysters mosca. They also make a cacciatore, which is basically al la grande with a rich tomato sauce thrown in for good measure.

[Rachel Perlow]

2. Joyce Goldstein's Pollo Arrosto all'Arancia, Limone, e Zenzero, Chicken Roasted with Orange, Lemon and Ginger from her book, Cucina Ebraica: Flavors of the Italian Jewish Kitchen.

Here's a link to buy the book:

Cucina Ebraica: Flavors of the Italian Jewish Kitchen by Joyce Esersky Goldstein, Ellen Silverman (Photographer), Joyce Eserky Goldstein

Please support eGullet by making Amazon links that give eGullet a commission. Click here for instructions. Thanks.

[phaelon56]

I just tried a garlic chicken recipe that I liked very much. Rub the outside of the bird with garlic infused olive oil. season the inside of the caivty with seasoned salt or your choice of pwedered spice mix. Roast in the pan (not on a rack) for the first 20 minutes with breast down, then loosen from pan, turn breast up and throw 20 full garlic cloves in and around the chicken. Roast for another 30 minutes or until internal temp is correct. Remove chicken, deglaze pan with a cup of white wine, mash in a few of the roasted garlic cloves into the wine and cook down for a sauce.

My guests were so impressed they thought I actually knew how to cook. It was so easy(to fool them - also the chicken was easy to prepare).

[SobaAddict70]

Time for bumpage.

I feel like a roast chicken this weekend, but I'm not going for 40 cloves of garlic, herbs or lemon. I'm looking for new ideas, so if you've got any to share, let's hear them.

[Ktepi]

Ever since reading Steingarten's essay on roasting chickens -- I think it's in It Must've Been Something I Ate -- I've been roasting chickens and haven't really stopped; I slowed for a while when it became harder to find whole chickens here that hadn't been injected with saline solution, but a butcher opened as if in response to that and the dire pork situation, and boom, I was roasting again.

For a few months there, I was doing them often enough that I had a jelly jar full of accumulated fond (which I used as the basis for the world's most intense chicken gumbo). Now I'm down to two or three a month.

How I do it:

Rub the chicken with salt and let sit for an hour. Rub it with a little ghee -- I keep ghee around just because it's what I prefer to cook with as my default fat, but I'm sure olive oil would be fine -- and put it in a big cast-iron pan, resting on those oversized forks you (I) stole from T.G.I. Friday's. Breast-side down. That's what I got from Steingarten -- breast-side down, high heat.

Roast at 450 until skin is golden and crispy and chicken is cooked through, probably an hour. With the breast protected by the body, it's pretty forgiving.

Serve with biscuits or flatbread to soak up the drippings, and/or lemon wedges and/or zaatar, to spritz/sprinkle over the chicken.

[Grub]

Well, there's always beer-can chicken, but my favorite chicken isn't roasted -- just done in a pan: Kelly's Asian Chicken. From Gilroy's Garlic Lovers' Cookbook (unanimous first place winner in garlic recipe and cookoff). The only thing more amazing than its taste, is how unbelievably simple it is -- only 20 minutes.

Chicken parted into serving pieces, and browned in a pan. Add 1 bulb garlic, coarsely chopped, couple of dried hot red peppers (according to taste, or left out if you're not fond of hot and spicy), 3/4 cup distilled white vinegar, 1/4 cup soy sauce, and 3 tablespoon honey. Simmer for about 10 minutes, and you've got some amazing, glazed chicken, with a really great sauce. Highly recommended.

[handmc]

I love chicken with 40 cloves of garlic. I made it once, on a Sunday when my, now wife, was out of town. It was true love. I used a 1/4rd chicken with EVOO and carrots and baby red skins cut in half. I sprinkled flat leaf parsley, minced, on the top with S&P and baked.

The potatoes where great, the chicken and garlic with crusty bread was Fantastic. The carrots, however, were overcooked.

I reaked of garlic so bad I got sent home from work.

I also love beer butt chicken, originally typed as Bear butt chicken (there's a flavor profile), as well as chicken with H de P, lemon and thyme.

Edited April 29, 2005 by handmc (log)

[shiv]

Any roast chicken is a good roast chicken in my eyes and I love to experiment. However, we keep coming back to the butterflied High-Heat Roast Chicken from Cooks Illustrated. It's simple, quick, easily changed up with different spices, and the chickeny-flavored potatoes it produces are to die for.

Come to think of it, that's probably more my favorite roast potato recipe than it is roast chicken...

[fiftydollars]

Thomas Keller's Bouchon cookbook has two solid, classic roast chicken recipes. One is a brined bird recipe that yields some of the crispiest skin I've ever had and the other is a completely simple roast chicken recipe that can easily go from grocery bag to oven in 5 minutes.

However, my favorite roast chicken is from Judy Rodgers' Zuni Cafe Cookbook. The difference is Rodgers simply salts the chicken two days in advance and without having to brine and whatnot the bird, it comes out ridiculously moist and delicious and the skin is just disgustingly crispy and perfect just-about-no-matter-what every effin time. She's an effin genius. If you've ever been to Zuni or tried her recipe, you know what I mean. It is the simplest recipe for roast chicken ever devised and yet it yields a chicken that I don't think can be substantially improved upon... ever.

Edited April 30, 2005 by fiftydollars (log)

[emmapeel]

An interesting article on Roast Chickens was in the Post-Gazette mid-April. It mentions Judy Rodger's chicken and Thomas Keller's. It continues to say that Keller does not use butter on the skin because the water content creates steam. Perhaps I'll clarify some butter and try that.

Edited April 30, 2005 by emmapeel (log)

[SuzySushi]

My favorite way of roasting chicken is the way an Armenian friend brought up in Lebanon taught me:

Place the chicken on a vertical roaster in a roasting pan. Rub the chicken generously with Aleppo pepper and za'atar. Pour about 1/2 cup of water into the roasting pan to prevent the fat from splattering. Roast at 375F until the chicken tests done.

[binkyboots]

Butter and plenty off it, rub all over and throw some salt and pepper on.

Sometimes simple is good.

Otherwise I like to mush up butter, garlic, lemon zest and grated ginger, maybe a little honey and use that.

*edit*

inspired by this thread I made the milk braised chicken (link back down the thread somewhere), wow, so tender and delicious, this is going to be a regular I think.

Edited April 30, 2005 by binkyboots (log)

[Fresser]

My chicken recipe may be slightly off-kilter, as I use only dark meat, but here goes.

Mince a large red onion and a Soba-esque quantity of garlic cloves. Mush both the onion and garlic together and paste the mixture under the chicken pieces' skin. Sprinkle some black pepper on top of the chicken pieces and plop them onto a sizzling hot broiler pan, skin-side up.

As the chicken starts to brown, baste the chicken pieces in cayenne pepper sauce (I use Frank's Red Hot). Broil the chicken for about thirty minutes, turning frequently and basting with more pepper sauce.

Vinegar from the cayenne pepper sauce will evaporate, so the chicken will not be too spicy, but rather MOST savory. And the garlic-onion mixture will season the chicken nicely, and the chicken skin will be crispy and flavorful.

I whipped up this recipe at Maggie the Cat's place once.

[jsolomon]

Get a cut-up chicken.

Brine it.

500F oven

20 min on one side, 10 min on the other.

Mind the smoke detector.

Zounds!

[Grub]

Beer Can Chicken

BCC is a fail-safe crowd-pleaser. Rub your favorite spice mixture on a whole chicken, shove a can of beer up its butt, and cook it real slow -- over indirect heat. Such prolonged grilling would normally dry it out, but the can ensures that it stays very moist.

There are two things to note right up front -- first, you can obviously use any type of can... But perhaps less obvious, you don't necessarily have to fill the can with beer -- water will keep it moist just fine. Unless you use a very bland spice rub, the end result is so full of flavor that it makes little difference whether you use water or Guinness.

The second thing to note, is that the saltiness of the rub seems to intensify during the cooking process. So don't use an overly salty spice rub.

Here's some very useful hardware. BBC is a minimalistic recipe, but if you cook it often enough, this little baby is a real lifesaver. No more messing around, trying to balance the bird on a beer can, over hot coals.

Um, some additional hardware... But seriously, the welding gloves are extremely useful. You can rearrange hot coals with those babies.

Ready to roll. Notice that the BCC-rack allows us to cook the bird on the lower grill, where the coals are. If the bird was placed on the top grill, the bottom would get much more heat than the top. There are soaked smoking chips over the coals. And there are cold, "fresh" coals on top of the hot ones, which means we don't have to add coals during the cooking process.

Put the lid on, and let 'er rip. Err, smoke. But do regulate the air-flow -- you don't want TOO much smoke. Of course, some recipes says to add the smoke chips towards the end of the cooking process, but this creates very little smoke flavor at all...

Two hours later... Intensely flavorful, crispy skin -- but juicy and moist like a sponge.

Make sure your grill has a bottom pan to catch the fat that renders off.

Here's the bad boy in all its glory. The only thing I can possibly think of, to improve this, would be to tie the wingtips in, as they get fairly crispy... But I'm not sure how butcher's twine would stand up to the heat, though.

Oh yeah -- make sure you oil the BBC rack thingie and can, or just spray it with "Pam." This doesn't just facilitate cleanup -- it makes it a whole lot easier to remove the chicken.

Super-moist, fall-apart tender, insanely flavorful, Beer Can Chicken!

[sparrowgrass]

Well, there's always beer-can chicken, but my favorite chicken isn't roasted -- just done in a pan: Kelly's Asian Chicken. From Gilroy's Garlic Lovers' Cookbook (unanimous first place winner in garlic recipe and cookoff). The only thing more amazing than its taste, is how unbelievably simple it is -- only 20 minutes.

Chicken parted into serving pieces, and browned in a pan. Add 1 bulb garlic, coarsely chopped, couple of dried hot red peppers (according to taste, or left out if you're not fond of hot and spicy), 3/4 cup distilled white vinegar, 1/4 cup soy sauce, and 3 tablespoon honey. Simmer for about 10 minutes, and you've got some amazing, glazed chicken, with a really great sauce. Highly recommended.

←

I did this Saturday night--really good and quick. I did have to tweak a bit--used brown sugar in place of the honey I didn't have, and added some grated ginger, because I am on a ginger kick right now.

Really good--did I say that already?--with basmati rice and fresh sparrowgrass.

[evilhomer]

after rinsing and drying the bird, LOTS of salt and pepper gets pat on and inside and let it stand in the fridge for about an hour - I'll stuff it with a lemon in thin slices and parsley stems or any other herb stems, sage is nice too - the flavour is minimal from these stuffings, if anything they flavour the gravy more than the meat, but they keep the bird moist whle roasting.

325 for 2+ hrs. breat side down for the first 60 minutes, up for the remainder.

there are free range chickens and then there are free range chickens. Oftentimes, an organic bird is anatomically similar to supermarket birds though usually with kidney/livers/heart inside and skin that seems tighter. Sometimes we get these birds which are quite expensive with very small breasts, very large legs and very dark meat. they have more of a left and right side than a top and bottom with the spine/breastbone as the equator. while great for coq au vin or other stewing/braising recipes, i don't love these dense and flavourful birds for roasting.

[Oceangroveguy]

Grub, did you make that rack, or buy it somewhere?

thanks for the excellent pix and tutorial. I've made BCC for years, and seen any number of articles about it, but none has been as clear as yours.

[lesfen]

I tend to roast simply as well... lemons in the cavity, juice all over, butter, and tons of S&P. 450 for the first 20 minutes, and then turn it down to roast. I love me some roasted chicken!

BUT, if I'm feelin' freaky, I break out my Two Hot Tamale's cook book and make their Red Roasted Chicken and serve it with yellow rice. YUM!!!

[Grub]

Grub, did you make that rack, or buy it somewhere?

thanks for the excellent pix and tutorial. I've made BCC for years, and seen any number of articles about it, but none has been as clear as yours.

←

Thanks, dude! The rack came from http://www.sportsmansguide.com -- but they don't seem to carry this exact model at the moment, though...

[petite tête de chou]

So I have a spatchcocked, 3 1/2 lb. chicken that has been rubbed with a spiced herb butter (under the skin, too). I want to roast it with potatoes and a ton of unpeeled garlic cloves. Questions galore...

I probably shouldn't use a rack because of the potatoes, right?

Should I cover it for awhile while it roasts? I adore crispy skin, so I'm thinking probably not. But will the potatoes and garlic be done at the same time? I've cut the Yukon's into decent sized chunks and the garlic cloves are pretty big.

Also, I was thinking of roasting it at about 375 for, cheeze, about an hour? Less? I have a pizza stone on the bottom of my oven if that makes a difference.

Please excuse the incredibly simplistic questions. I just bought a range with a working oven (always a good thing for a new appliance) after not having one for over four years. Thanks all.