Easy Autumn: Better Than Rotisserie Chicken Chicken

The best dressing for fall greens and salads to make right now

Better Than Rotisserie Chicken Chicken

I like to roast a chicken in some way or another pretty frequently to keep up my supply of chicken broth, especially as the days get shorter and soups and stews are more called for. I don’t think I have actually yet published a whole roast chicken recipe which seems absurd, so here it is. I made this chicken for a lunch I catered recently and had several requests for a recipe.

I think there are two camps when it comes to handling a roast chicken. On one side there is the beautifully trussed chicken, roasted to golden perfection and carved with a knife into clean pieces. On the other, the camp I fall into, is the less beautiful, but equally golden chicken that is rested in all of its delicious juices and pulled apart with your hands. I make the case for this kind of roasted bird in part because I am fairly hopeless at carving meat but also because I think it just tastes better.

I have found the most important factor in making a good roast chicken- note that I am not pretending it to be the most beautiful- is how you roast it. Of course seasoning matters and if you want to season it ahead of time or stick it in a brine that’s all well and good, but I think that so long as you salt the cavity and the outside of the chicken well, you can do it 1 minute before it goes into the oven and it’s still going to be great, provided it’s roasted the right way.

And by “right way” I really just mean mostly roasting the chicken breast side down so that all the lovely fat from the back and legs and wings has a chance to melt over the breast as it renders out, leaving you with perfectly cooked legs and wings and still-tender breast meat. Because it takes longer for the leg meat to soften, often the breast is dried out and over done by the time the legs are really succulent. With this method, the legs help protect the breast while they become perfectly cooked. This does mean that when you go to serve your bird, the thigh meat is likely to be so soft it’s going to fall off the bone, hence the best way is to just get your hands in there and pull it apart!