Mastering the Baked Chicken Dinner

Home cooks take note, an important key to perfecting your weekly meal planning is to incorporate a whole baked chicken each week. I like to cook one every Sunday or Monday night to start the week off right.

This is a simple addition to the week that has multiple benefits including a lovely simple dinner the first night, bone broth to enhance future meals, chicken fat (schmaltz) to sauté veges later, and plenty of meat leftover for snacks and soup later in the week. The giblets (neck, heart, gizzard, liver, etc.) can be separated and saved each week until you have enough saved up in the freezer for pâté and other delicacies, or you could add them to your next batch of bone broth. If you raise and process your own chickens or ask your local supplier the feet can be a great source of gelatin when added to your bone broth as well.

For those of you thinking that chicken feet spend their lifetime covered in chicken poop and mud and must be disgusting, I have good news. The outer layer of skin including the claws peel right off like the shell of a shrimp when you boil them briefly in hot water, leaving a pristine and clean foot below. But I digress, back to mastering the baked chicken.

The fundamentals of baking a chicken really couldn’t be easier. I prefer to use a heavy duty casserole dish with lid like the one below. Preheat the oven to 425 F and while it’s heating up rinse and dry off the whole chicken, removing giblets, if any, from the inside. Next rub down the bird in olive oil and sprinkle a mix of salt (1 tsp) and herbs and spices that suit your mood. I love using tarragon, but it is also fun to use the mix of parsley sage, rosemary and thyme. Sometimes I use an Ethiopian spice mix or Tandoori spice mix as well. Be creative. I go heavy on the herbs for more flavor, using 2 tablespoon minimum of total herbs in the dish.

Once rubbed with oil and spiced, place the whole bird in your casserole dish and add 1 cup of dry white and 1 cup of chicken or vegetable stock if you have it available. Cover with lid and place in the 425 F oven for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, turn your oven down to 375 F and cook for an additional hour or more until the internal temperature reads at least 165 F and the skin is nice and crispy.

This week I tried a new variation called Roasted Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic from the awesome cookbook Healing Spices by Harat B. Aggarwal. You read that right, 40 cloves of garlic for one medium sized bird.

I prepared the bird as described above (parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme version) then added 31 (all I had) cloves of garlic, separated but still in their paper skin, all around the bird. I tucked them down so they were mostly in the wine and stock at the bottom of the roasting pan. They cooked down to a light buttery texture that was so fun to squish from the paper skin against the roof of your mouth.

The stock in the bottom was divine. After removing the bird from the pan, I added a little flour to thicken and made a sauce to go over mashed red potatoes (skins on) and veges served on the side. This was a delicious version of the basic roasted chicken, and I can't think of a better way to get more garlic in my diet. Yum!

What is your favorite variation of the basic whole roasted chicken?