My wife told me that I was probably mad this weekend as I was embarking on cooking roast chicken on the hottest day of the year so far. This would probably have been true if I had been undertaking my normal roast procedures that require about three hours of hard labour. In this case I did not serve roast potatos or any complicated purees or anything like that and I would reccommend what follows to anyone (good thing too since I’m posting it on a public page on the internet).
Summer roast chicken:
Get a Chicken, the higher the quality the better. Leave the elastic band/string on the bird and then take half a lemon and stick it into the cavity of the chicken. Make sure that if you have bought a chicken with the Giblets in then you have removed them!
Now get some butter and mix with whatever flavourings you want. In my opinion this is dependant on the quality of the meat, if you have a fully organic corn fed uberchicken then that has all the flavour you need so just use butter. You need enough butter to cover the breasts of the chicken with a layer roughly 5mm thick. The hardest part is where you put this layer, it needs to be between the skin and the flesh of the breasts. You can gently peel the skin away from the breasts, starting at the cavity end. DO NOT use a knife for this or it could go horribly wrong in many ways. Once the butter is in the chicken, season the outside of the skin with salt and pepper… Don’t put it in the oven yet.
Next step is to get one large baking potato for each person eating. Cover a baking tray in a thin layer of salt and put the potatos on that (prick them if you wish but it’s not necessary). Now put the potatos and the chicken in a preheated oven at about 180 degrees celsius (don’t ask what gas mark that is, gas ovens are rubbish). DO NOT COVER THE CHICKEN, this is very important. The whole thing should take about an hour and a half to cook (depending on the size of the bird and the potatos).
All you need to do now is make the gravy and cook the veg. What veg you have is up to you so I won’t get involved there, the gravy is another matter. You will need about a pint of chicken stock ready to go when the bird comes out of the oven which should be 20 minutes before serving. Remove the chicken from your roasting tin and carefully tip it so that all the juice runs out of the cavity and into the tin, then remove the lemon half from the bird and place the chicken on a board to rest.
Get the roasting tin on the stove and heat, add the chicken stock and use a wooden spoon to combine the caremelised roasting juices with the stock, this takes about one and a half minutes. Now add all this liquid into a saucepan. You can thicken your gravy using several methods, cornflour, gravy powder or a mixture of butter and flour (in equal quantities) called “beurre manie”. Mix this into your sauce base with a whisk over a medium heat.
Final job before serving is to prepare the potato. Remove the potato flesh from the skins (careful not to burn yourself) into a bowl and add finely chopped spring onions with a little butter and salt and pepper. Use a fork to mix it all up. You’re not trying to properly mash the potato here, just crush it up and mix.
Now serve. If this isn’t really really tasty then to be honest, you’ve done it wrong.
Helpful hints.
Use a brush to periodically baste the skin of the chicken during roasting using the juices from the pan. You want it as crispy as possible.
When removing the flesh from the potatos, just cut them in half and squeeze them (you’ll need a cloth round your hand to avoid painful burns)
Allow the gravy to cool slightly before serving it as you can then skim a lot of the fat off the top.
Always recycle. The bones can be used to make stock once you’ve finished eating the meat and you will probably get enough chicken left over to make a tasty risotto later in the week!
