Recipe: How To Make A Perfect Roast Chicken
Roast Chicken, done right is delicious and tender, but with a crispy skin. Far too often though, the meat is dry, tough and stringy, and the skin soft.
With rotisserie chickens available just about everywhere, the art of roasting a chicken seems to be disappearing – which is a shame because it is so easy!
The most important thing with roasting a chicken – is the chicken! Getting a really good quality organic, free-range chicken will put you on the path to success. A good quality chicken is also the best bet if you want to make use of the carcass for making a chicken stock.
My method couldn’t be a any simpler, so next time you go to get a rotisserie chicken, why not try this instead?
Roast Chicken Ingredients
- Chicken (ideally organic, free-range and pasture raised)
- A lemon
- Fresh thyme
- 3 garlic cloves
- 50ml (2 fl oz) olive oil
- Sea salt & fresh ground black pepper
How To Make Roast Chicken
Preheat the oven to 200C (400F)
Rinse the chicken and remove the giblets. Dry the chicken using kitchen paper.
Cut the lemon in half and sandwich a sprig of the thyme in the middle. Put the lemon inside the chicken cavity.
Skin and crush the garlic cloves and add to a food processor with the leaves of the remaining thyme and the olive oil and blend together.
Massage the olive oil mixture into the chicken thoroughly, ensuring it is completely covered.
Put the bird into a roasting tray, and top with any remaining oil. Season with salt and pepper.
Cover the chicken loosely with foil and roast for 30 minutes.
Reduce the temperature to 170C (330F) and remove the foil and roast for a further 20 minutes, or until the juices run clear when the bird is pierced with a skewer.
Turn off the oven, but allow the chicken to rest in the hot oven for ten minutes, before removing from the oven to carve.
Pour the juices from the roasting tray over the sliced chicken to serve, or set aside to make a gravy. The carcass can be used to make a chicken stock.
Enjoy – and please share your roasting tips and tricks in the comments below!
