Whole Roasted Chicken on a Bed of Root Vegetables

Page 22

Cuisine: North American | Course Type: Main Courses

(8 reviews)

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Recipe Review

Unlike many of the other recipes in this book, this one didn't involve extra steps beyond how I'd normally roast a chicken. It really is fairly simple, and the result was very good, with one caveat. So, with something like chicken (and this is how you can tell a chef by the quality of their chicken), what brings it to a high level is the quality of the bird itself, the preparation and the roasting.

I used a hormone and antibiotic-free, free-range chicken, and let it rest at room temperature for a couple of hours as he suggests. I took it out of the oven just as it hit 160 degrees F at the thigh (make sure you start checking early - last time I made this I checked 30 minutes after I turned the heat down and it was already over 160) and let it rest for 20 minutes, also part of the recipe. This resulted in a particularly juicy bird (so often people overcook and dry them out, worried about not getting them hot enough).

My caveat is the roast vegetables; they ended up soaking in about an inch of chicken fat, butter and canola oil, and some of them were less roasted than a sort of confit. Also roasted leeks didn't really work for me. Now, I might have had a particularly fatty chicken. In future I'll check earlier and drain off much of the fat - not that I'm against chicken fat, but that I like roast veggies to be fairly dry.

I will do it again though, it was quite tasty, and crucially, provided leftovers for a wonderful pot pie (page 24).

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