Tatiana's Best Ever Roast Chicken Recipe » It Was a Very Good Year @ EverythingMom.com

Have you ever thought about what you’d like your last meal to be?  I have.  And mine would feature roast chicken as the centre piece.  There is nothing so amazing, comforting, and downright delicious as roast chicken with crisp, yummy skin.  And don’t bother denying yourself the skin!  Live a little!   Skimp on dessert if you must.  You don’t want to miss the flavour that this recipe results in.

Tatiana’s Best Ever Roast Chicken

Time to table: 4.5-6.5 hours (1-1.5hr cooking, .5hr active prep, 3-5hr passive prep)
Ingredients:
1 whole chicken
2 tbsp thyme
2 tbsp olive oil
2 lemons (and their zest)
salt (kosher or sea salt for brining, you can use regular table salt for seasoning)
Dishes & utensils:
Sharp chef’s knife
Roasting dish
Meat thermometer (they’re like $10 at Ikea. No excuses!)

1.  Spatchcock (butterfly) your chicken.  If you’re squeamish, this can be a pretty horrifying process.  You can get away with just cutting out the backbone and ignoring the breastbone, but it’s worth the effort of getting the breastbone out of your chicken as well.

2. Brine your chicken for at least half an hour, preferably a whole hour, but not more than 2 (for a 6-7 lb chicken).  This means you want to submerge your chicken in water that has salt and sugar in it.  I use a ratio of around 1 gallon of water to 1/2c of sea or kosher salt to 1/4c of white sugar, and scale it up from there (we generally brine in our sink).

3. Rinse your chicken off under cool running water, then dry it thoroughly, front and back (I use paper towels).  Salt and pepper front and back.  Set skin-side up in a roasting pan.  Put in the fridge, uncovered, for two to four hours.  You can leave it in there for a shorter or longer amount of time, it won’t hurt your chicken, but remember that the drier the skin is, the crispier it will end up being.

4. Preheat your oven to 450 degrees.

5. Zest your lemons and halve them.  Mix zest, thyme, and olive oil together.

6. Tuck the halved lemons, cut side up, beneath your chicken.  Coat skin side with your flavouring.

7. Put chicken in the 450 degree oven for 15 minutes.  Turn heat down to 400 after that.  Your chicken will cook pretty quickly, between 30-45 minutes (depending on how many times you open up the oven to look at it!)

8.  Your chicken is finished when a meat thermometer inserted into the breast reads 160 degrees Fahrenheit or, in the case of my grocery store chicken, the thermometer pops.  Grocery store chickens will be taken to a whole new level with this spatchcock, brine, and dry method, but if you can get to a farmer’s market and get a fresh chicken, do it.

9. You can now easily halve or quarter the chicken.  No more wrestling!  ENJOY!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 1:47 am and is filed under Cooking, Mom Influencer Exclusive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.