This week is going to be roasted chicken week on my blog. I started to write this post and then realized there’s far more than one entry can handle! So, here goes! Enjoy roasted chicken week :)
I really like being thrifty. My husband sometimes says I’m cheap, but we’ll say thrifty. I don’t mind adding a little extra “elbow grease” with something less expensive if it results in a product that is as good or even better than I could buy for more. I say even better with chicken in mind. At least in my area, whole chickens are always cheaper than buying the meat cut up. Our grocery stores also seem to have sales on whole chickens fairly often, and when they do, I stock up! My husband can tell when there was a sale on whole chickens because the freezer is full of them! So, is it really worth it to buy a whole chicken. Absolutely! Here’s why:
The meat is really juicy when cooked with the whole chicken. The first time I roasted a chicken and my husband and I started eating the chicken breasts, we couldn’t believe how good it tasted! So much better than when you have to cook them separately.
You really get a lot of meat from the whole chicken. It may require a bit of effort to get it off, but it’s totally worth it. When I roast a 4-ish pound chicken, we have enough meat for a week’s worth of meals.
The carcass can be used to make chicken stock. Yes, you can buy chicken stock, but homemade is so much better!
So, how do you roast a chicken? If you look online, you’ll find a lot of opinions. Here’s mine:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees
Look at the packaging to see how much the chicken weighs. This matters for cooking time! Unwrap the chicken and take the “innard” bag out of the chicken. If the chicken was frozen, you’ll want to make sure it is well defrosted before you try this or you will end up standing over the sink burning your hands with hot water stabbing at the center of the bird with a steak knife pulling out one piece at a time (That doesn’t sound like it happened to me, does it?) Save the innards for making stock. I just put them in a sealed bowl until I’m ready to make stock.
Put the chicken on a cast iron skillet and pour canola or vegetable oil over the top. You need a high smoke point oil like vegetable or canola, but if you prefer another that’s fine. I don’t think olive oil works well for this. You can also coat the bird in butter, but I really try to minimize my handling of it.
Salt and pepper the bird. You can also add any other seasonings you’d like. I sometimes put Italian seasoning on the outside.
Cut up an onion and stuff it inside the bird. It helps keep the bird really juicy and the onion ends up tasting awesome too! Whenever the chicken comes out of the oven, my husband always goes straight for the onion. If you don’t have an onion, you can use celery, but I like the onion better.
That’s it! Put the chicken in your preheated oven. It needs to cook 20 minutes + 20 minutes per pound. (So, if the chicken weighs 4 pounds it needs to cook 20 minutes + 20 x 4 = 100 minutes or 1 hour 40 minutes)
When the chicken comes out, test it with a meat thermometer. The internal temperature needs to have reached 160 degrees to be safe to eat!
A few safety things: I don’t wash my chicken because I really want to minimize the surfaces the raw chicken comes in contact with. This is also why I don’t use butter. With the oil, the chicken can just sit there and have it poured on. Also, make sure to thoroughly clean any surfaces the raw chicken touched! It needs to reach an internal temperature of 160 degrees to be thoroughly cooked, so do make sure it’s there.
My husband and I eat off the roast chicken and then after dinner, I take the remaining meat off the bones for the rest of the week. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you what we do with the rest of the meat.
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