Roast Chicken

Like they say, cooking is an art and baking is a science. As such, I try to refrain from baking. If something goes wrong with my cooking, I can still salvage it and call it modern art, but I’ve never had any such luck with baking-gone-wrong. But try as you might, it’s hard to resist the allure of $1.49/lb for a whole chicken at Whole Foods (hah). So I procured a 4 lb chicken (asked the butcher to keep the giblets, liver and all that other grossness) and brought the sucker home.

What you will need: Whole chicken, salt, black pepper, rosemary/thyme/oregano, olive oil, potatoes

First, preheat the oven to 400F. You have more than enough time to get everything ready by the time the oven is ready for you. Next, you pat the chicken dry (I used kitchen towels). I then cut a clementine (I didn’t have any lemons, but I had 3 lbs or so of clementines lying around so it seemed pretty logical) in half and thrust it into the cavity of the chicken. This is to perfume the inside of the chicken and to keep it from drying out.

Next, I chopped up a whole bunch of potatoes and filled the bottom of an oven pan, then tossed them with some dry rosemary (you can use oregano or thyme instead if you’d like), a VERY VERY SMALL AMOUNT of olive oil, salt, and black pepper. People who bake often might have baking racks or whatever you call the thing that holds up the meat so it doesn’t touch the bottom of the baking container and get soggy, but since I didn’t have one of these, I grabbed the wire rack from Holly’s toaster oven and set it over the potatoes. You may have guessed correctly that the chicken was, in fact, going to rest atop this wire rack. Why the potatoes, you ask? Because I read somewhere that if you don’t have the potatoes at the bottom to absorb the fat dripping off the chicken, the fat is going to splatter everywhere, and the heat is going to make the fat smoke, and you might end up with a big pile of ugly, not to mention a possible smoke-alarm situation. Well, I didn’t want any of that business.

Next I made the rub. And then, I rubbed the rub all over my chicken. I tried to get some under the skin, but the skin on this sucker was pretty tight, so I didn’t bother to try very hard. I also made sure that I got some of the rub all over the insides of the chicken. Then, to make sure the chicken didn’t dry out, I had to truss the legs together. Sane people would use twine or those fancy silicon things you can get at any kitchen store, but I hadn’t thought about this at all while I was at the store, so I just found a twisty-tie and burned all the paper off of it with a creme brulée torch and washed the soot off and used this instead. Coz that’s how I roll. Place the chicken on the rack, and then move the oven pan to the top third of the oven (I assume your oven has preheated by now). Start your timer and just get the hell away from there. Go watch Adult Swim. No peeking.

Come back in 40 minutes, and flip the chicken so the bottom is on top and vice-versa. Come back in 20 minutes and pull the chicken out of the oven. Stick a thermometer into the thigh. Is it between 165F and 175F? It should be. Beautiful. Let the chicken sit for a good 10 minutes so the juices can redistribute themselves through the meat. Take the bird off the rack and set it on a cutting board or however you’re going to be distributing it among the people gathered around you at this point. Then, I (Holly, really) drained the potatoes and mopped up any lingering fat with kitchen towels. I made some store-bought 5 minute stuffing. At this point, we were so anxious to dig into the chicken. Everything smelled so delicious. And by Jupiter, it was all so awesome. The potatoes were scrumpalicious, the chicken was so tender and juicy and the stuffing…well, it tasted like stuffing. We ate all of it over the next two or three days.

Will I do this again? You bet your sweet ass I will. If any of you have done this before, tell me what you did and how you did it. I’d love to change it up.