One thing that I think every home cook should have in their repertoire is a good, classic, moist, flavorful roasted chicken. Sure, you can go to the grocery store and buy a rotisserie chicken for about the same cost, but if you do a cost comparison by weight, the bird you get from the rotisserie is scrawny compared to what you can cook at home. Yes it's convenient, but honestly roasting a bird yourself does not take very much effort, you just need a few ingredients and the time for it to cook.
Another thing that I think you need to successfully pull off a roast of any kind is a good meat thermometer... or two. You'll read in this post about the two types of meat thermometers I use, why I have two of them, and why you need at least one good one.
Disclaimer: this is not a professional food blog (gasp)! It's my hobby. The food section of this blog is me rambling about food, sharing some recipes I have tweaked and love, and providing some cooking tips to those who are interested. So I'm posting iPhone pictures today because we left our DSLR camera at the hospital when we visited my BFF and her new baby. Which I'm so glad we brought because we used it to take exactly zero pictures. Anyway, I don't care that I'm just posting iPhone pictures, I just want to have something to show you guys the step-by-step for delicious chicken, and this will do the trick.
Ingredients:
1 roasting chicken
1/3 stick of softened butter
2-3 tbsp olive oil
Dried or fresh herbs
Paprika
Salt and pepper
4-8 garlic cloves
1-2 lemons, quartered or sliced (optional)
3/4 cup dry white wine
Steps:
1. Clear out the cavity of the bird. Remove the giblets bag and any huge pieces of fat (save these to make homemade chicken stock after!!). Check the skin for any feathers that stuck around and pull those bad boys out. Preheat oven to 425*
2. Prepare your herb rub. Mix the butter, olive oil, herbs, and about 1/2 tsp each of salt and pepper until combined into a paste. The herbs I use as a base are easy to remember if your parents were also quasi-hippies who were into folk singer-songwriter music... Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. I'm not kidding. I added chives this time for some onion flavor too which I really enjoy. Start out by adding the herbs in about equal proportions, and over time you'll experiment with different ratios until you find one you really like (I didn't have any garlic cloves left so I added some garlic powder to my herb rub. If using fresh garlic, don't use it yet). Save the paprika for the end, don't add it to the herb butter yet.
3. Separate the skin from the breast. You'll know the breast side from the back side because the back of the chicken is hard without much meat. If you're feeling that side, then flip it over. Starting from the top (near the wings and away from the legs), wiggle your fingers between the skin and the meat until it separates. Take some of your herb butter and spread it down between the meat and the skin. Get it as evenly spread as you can.
4. Spread most of the remaining herb butter over the entire bird on the outside of the skin, making sure to cover every bit of it. Spread the remaining herb butter on the inside of the cavity. (Reminder that raw chicken has a ton of bacteria so any time you touch the raw bird, thoroughly wash your hands before touching anything else, especially other food! And same goes for any utensils or cutting boards).
5. Smash and peel your garlic cloves. No need to press or mince them, just make sure you gave them a good smash with the side of your knife. Put the garlic cloves and cut up lemon into the cavity of the chicken.
6. Sprinkle all of the skin on the outside with salt, pepper, and paprika. To do this, I usually keep one hand clean to sprinkle seasoning, and use the other to turn and manipulate the bird. Because as I said, and I can't say this enough, once anything has touched the raw chicken, it needs to be washed with soap and water before it can touch anything else. So do not salt and pepper one side, then turn the bird over, and grab your pepper grinder and dig your fingers into your salt dish... You'd need to do one side, turn it over, wash your hands thoroughly with soap and hot water, then do the other side. And by this point you've probably washed your hands a couple of times from putting on the herb rub, so that's my tip to save one more washing: one hand to sprinkle, one hand to work with the bird.
7. Truss your bird. Yes that's English. Basically trussing is using kitchen twine to tie up the wings and legs so they don't burn, as pictured above. If you just put the bird in the oven the way it was, the limbs get loose and because there's less meat on them, they would cook crazy fast and would dry out by the time the rest of the meat is cooked. So the easiest way to do this is to tie the exposed bones of the legs together, and then set the bird on top of the wings. Doing this keeps everything together so it cooks much more evenly.
8. Time to decide what you want to cook the bird in. I prefer using my cast-iron skillet because it allows for good even heating. Whatever you use, make sure that it has high enough sides to collect the drippings as the chicken cooks... So no sheet pans, and I would even avoid jelly roll pans. A glass dish works ok too.
9. As mentioned, fold the wings under the bird and place it breast side up in your cooking vessel. Pour the white wine into the dish. As the bird bakes, the wine will cook off and steam and flavor the bird keeping the meat moist and tender.
10. This week's gotta have item is a good cooking thermometer... Or a few. I have two, one that's an instant read, and one that is used as the food cooks and has an alarm (that is what's sticking out of the side of the chicken). Poultry needs to cook to 165 degrees to be safely eaten, but the higher you go above that the drier your chicken will be. The thickest part of the bird will take the longest to get there, so stick the probe of your oven-safe cooking thermometer into the thickest part of your particular bird, usually either the thigh or the breast for chicken. Make sure you are not hitting bone and they you are not poking through into the cavity. He temperature is taken on the very end of he probe, so make sure that part of the probe is in the thickest part of the meat. On mine, I then tell it what kind of meat I'm cooking and it tells me what the cooking temp should be, as noted 165 for chicken or any poultry. Then I turn on the alarm, and it will go off as soon as my meat is done. So there are no timers involved in this recipe, it tells me when it's done... To quote Ina Garten, "how simple is that!?" So now you have the probe thermometer placed, make sure the cable has enough room, and that the display can be safely kept outside of the oven. 
11. Put your whole dish in the oven, being careful about the thermometer probe. Roast at 425 for about 30-45 minutes, or until the skin is nice and golden brown and starting to get crispy. You will then drop the oven temp to 350 and continue cooking until your alarm goes off, about another hour, though this greatly varies on the size of your chicken, your oven, many other things. Starting high then going low allows us to have golden crispy skin and moist tender meat. If we stayed at 425 the whole time, the bird would be super dry. If we stayed at 350 the whole time, it would take forever and the skin would get yellow at best and wouldn't crisp up (and honestly, what's the point of that?).
12. Make sure that the bottom of your pan is never dry. As the wine evaporates, the fat and juices from your chicken will start to render off and should replace that cooking liquid. However if your wine evaporates before your bird gives up its juices, just add a little more wine or even some chicken broth would be just fine.
13. When your alarm goes off, pull the bird and double check the temp. This is where the instant read thermometer comes in handy. I recently bought myself a gift... The ThermaPen! It is a wonderful, accurate tool and was a great investment for my kitchen. After the oven-probe thermometer says we're ready, I use the ThermaPen to test a few different areas and make sure that no matter where I put it, it reads at least 165. This is important because the ThermaPen is more accurate than the oven-probe, and it also reads the temp more quickly. The oven probe heats up and cools down slowly, so the reading might be slightly delayed. I typically check two spots on each breast, one leg, and one thigh. This is overkill and totally not professional, because it pokes a bunch of holes in this beautiful bird you just roasted, but I don't care, I'd rather be safe with a few puncture wounds than serve undercooked chicken! You'll also know you're ready if the "juices run clear." This is something you hear and read a lot, but what it means is that when you pick the bird up, especially if you've made any cuts yet, the juices that come out might have a color at first, but after a second they clear up. Not crystal clear like water, but they shouldn't be red or brown, they should be clear to light broth colored and definitely translucent.
14. Let the bird rest. Residual heat will actually continue to cook the meat (for this reason, I'll sometimes pull it out when my oven gauge thermometer reads 160 because those last few degrees will come from residual heat). This means that parts of the chicken that are well above 165 will keep transferring some of their heat to parts of the chicken that are cooler, so it will continue to rise a bit. The benefit to letting the meat rest is that the meat will be more moist. When you heat meat, the muscle fibers you're cooking totally relax and let out all of their liquid. And that liquid is going all over in the meat at a molecular level as it gets hotter and hotter. But when you take it out of the heat and it begins to cool, the muscle fibers begin to contract again and as they do, they re-absorb a lot of that liquid. This can take 10-15 minutes for a chicken. If you were to carve the bird up right when you took it out of the oven, all that liquid would run out onto your cutting board and the meat would be dry. If you let your meat rest, that liquid redistributes back into the muscle fibers and makes it more moist. The challenge is that you don't want to serve cold meat! So one common trick is to "tent" your meat, meaning make a little tent out of aluminum foil to rest over top. Because it doesn't touch the meat directly it won't make the skin get as mushy, but the foil will help keep in enough heat that you won't serve cold chicken (this trick goes for any meat - steak, roast, turkey, whatever! The bigger the pieces of meat, the longer it should rest).
14. Let the bird rest. Residual heat will actually continue to cook the meat (for this reason, I'll sometimes pull it out when my oven gauge thermometer reads 160 because those last few degrees will come from residual heat). This means that parts of the chicken that are well above 165 will keep transferring some of their heat to parts of the chicken that are cooler, so it will continue to rise a bit. The benefit to letting the meat rest is that the meat will be more moist. When you heat meat, the muscle fibers you're cooking totally relax and let out all of their liquid. And that liquid is going all over in the meat at a molecular level as it gets hotter and hotter. But when you take it out of the heat and it begins to cool, the muscle fibers begin to contract again and as they do, they re-absorb a lot of that liquid. This can take 10-15 minutes for a chicken. If you were to carve the bird up right when you took it out of the oven, all that liquid would run out onto your cutting board and the meat would be dry. If you let your meat rest, that liquid redistributes back into the muscle fibers and makes it more moist. The challenge is that you don't want to serve cold meat! So one common trick is to "tent" your meat, meaning make a little tent out of aluminum foil to rest over top. Because it doesn't touch the meat directly it won't make the skin get as mushy, but the foil will help keep in enough heat that you won't serve cold chicken (this trick goes for any meat - steak, roast, turkey, whatever! The bigger the pieces of meat, the longer it should rest).
15. Carve and serve!! The best parts of the chicken to serve this way are the breasts and legs (the wings don't serve as well when done like this). You can serve 4-6 people with one chicken, depending on how many side dishes you have. My advice is to use a good, sharp, long carving knife. When carving the breast, start in the middle just to one side of the breast bone, and carve down till you meet resistance. Then starting at one end, start carving along the bottom in towards the breast bone and from one end to the other. You've just released most of the breast - you probably didn't get 100% of the meat but that's ok... I'll tell you what to do with that in a future post! Repeat for the other breast. For the legs, carve the skin around the drumstick to release that from the rest of the body. Then you'll grab where the drumstick meets the thigh, and pull out away from the body a bit. It should start to release at the hip joint, and that's how you know where to carve. Give it a little tug and it will show you where it needs to be detached. You'll now have the drumstick and thigh in one piece disconnected from the main body.
Here's part of our dinner for that night: some light meat (1/2 breast), some dark meat (one leg), and a couple of biscuits. Not pictured: romaine salad with tomatoes, onions, peppers, red wine vinegar and olive oil.
The last chicken we bought was almost a 4 lb bird and we paid $7.15 for it. Yes the already-cooked rotisserie chickens are like $6, but those are seriously half the size of this one. We got 4 good sized portions from the first cut of the bird (two legs, two breasts). Then I was able to take what was left and pick off a bowl full of other meat that I used to make 2 trays of chicken enchiladas. So that's another 4 meals. And we're still not done... I then used the bones, skin, gibkets, and drippings in the bottom of the cast iron pan to make about 2 gallons of some of the darkest, most beautiful chicken stock I've ever made! And that's sitting in the freezer waiting to be made into soups, risotto, casseroles, sauces, who knows! I could get another 8 meals out of that in the future. I'll definitely detail how to use your kitchen scraps to make stock in a future post!!
But for those of you keeping score at home, not including the stock (which on sale let's say is $2 per quart, and I made 8 quarts, so there's $16 out of thin air), that comes to 8 meals that I was able to get out of a $7 chicken... It makes me so sad when people think eating healthy is expensive! In most cases, it is significantly cheaper to do all of your shopping around the perimeter of the grocery store focusing on lean protein and produce and avoid the processed crap in the aisles of the store.
I have to share with you something that broke my heart... this was such a moment of sadness for me about the health of our country and why we have an obesity epidemic. It is because of the intersection of convenient and cheap. Or in this case actual convenience and perceived cheapness. The second page in the sale paper for Jewel today... All of these items are buy 4, get $4 off (but they're still relatively expensive compared to real food!): Chips Ahoy, Ritz crackers, Kraft singles, sliced variety of cheeses, variety of block cheeses, Bologna, Lunchables, bacon, hot dogs, easy cheese, bacon again, Easy Mac, Velveeta skillet dinner kits, mayonnaise, Kraft salad dressing (pictured: ranch and thousand island), Cheese Nips, Chips Ahoy again... My lord. Folks I promise you, you will be less hungry, feel better, have less health problems, and save money by avoiding the center aisles (except for whole grains like brown rice, oats, and beans) and eating more whole foods. It's a hard habit to break because your brain reacts similarly to junk food as it does to opiate drugs, but once you get over the hump it'll be the best thing you ever did. I highly recommend the book Salt, Sugar, Fat to anyone who is interested by this topic. Getting off my soap box now...
Cooking a whole chicken only takes a few steps of prep work and then with the right tools, you can set it and forget it. It's a delicious, healthy, beautiful, and impressive center piece for any meal, and it is very cost effective. Just remember that it will take a few hours to cook (my first attempt started far too late and we were eating chicken at midnight... I'll never live that one down).
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