When in Doubt, Roast a Chicken
January is not my best month, culinarily speaking. I’m burnt out from holiday cooking, but also bored by takeout, and usually end up eating exceedingly simple things that barely qualify as meals, like a fried egg over rice, tuna salad, or an entire bag of frozen lima beans, cooked until almost falling apart and finished with a little butter and salt. It’s a little stark, a little bare bones, a little gloomy.
In uninspired times like these, it’s best to roast a chicken.
Roasting a chicken has many obvious benefits. It’s an easy way to meal prep—I can make a chicken last at least 5 days. Once the bones have been picked of all their meat, the carcass can be used to make broth. It also warms the house and fills it with a welcoming aroma. Roasted chicken just feels and tastes homey.
We also have many roasted chicken recipes to choose from—a whole collection, in fact—which takes the pressure off when I’m facing decision fatigue.
Most of our chickens are spatchcocked (butterflied). By removing the backbone and flattening the bird, the lean breasts and unctuous legs cook at a similar rate, so the former is less likely to overcook while the latter climbs to its prescribed collagen-melting temp of at least 175℉. It also cuts down on the oven time overall—this Spatchcocked Roasted Chicken with Gochujang Butter, for example, takes all of an hour to prepare, start to finish. (If you’ve never removed the backbone of a bird, don’t worry, we have a guide that shows you how to do exactly that.)
Once you’ve mastered this small bit of butchery, you can focus on the flavors. The Korean-inspired seasoning paste used to flavor the Gochujang Butter Chicken is made with a blend of softened butter, fermented gochujang paste and honey, plus fresh ginger and garlic, which mellow and sweeten as they cook. It’s spicy-sweet and loaded with umami, but not as much umami as our Umami-Bomb Chicken. That one is flavored with a glutamate-heavy mix of Parmesan, miso, garlic, and tomato paste, rubbed under the skin, directly on the meat. We do the same thing with our Suya-Spiced Chicken, which uses a bold seasoning rub of ground peanuts, hot paprika, brown sugar, garlic and ginger inspired by West African grilled beef skewers.
If you want to keep the flavor profile simple and versatile, you should make Roasted Chicken, Perfected, a 3-ingredient recipe that calls for breaking the bird down into parts completely. (To make things even easier on yourself, have your butcher do this for you. I promise you they will not mind.) Separating the dark meat from the white gives you more control, so there’s no risk of over- or undercooking. (While 175℉ is a decent end-point for dark meat, cooking it to 195℉ ensures all that gnarly connective tissue breaks down into silky gelatin.)
Or you can just pick your favorite chicken part and focus on that. I’m a leg and thighs fan, and Slashed Chicken Legs have saved me on many an uninspired night. Slashing is the fastest route to deep flavor. With the exception of salt, nearly all flavor compounds are too big to penetrate into the meat. Making deep cuts, all the way down to the bone, creates more surface area for seasonings to cling to, which translates to more flavor. I like a simple marinade of onion, garlic, fish sauce, and sugar, which is whirred together in the food processor, but we have other flavor profiles to explore, like Miso-Garlic, Chipotle-Lime, Chili-Garlic, and Chinese Five Spice.
And while I don’t have a slow cooker, I appreciate slow cooking. Instead of using high heat, like we do in so many roasted chicken recipes, our Slow-Roasted Chicken with Garlic and Mustard Pan Sauce takes a different approach. Roasting chicken leg quarters for a few hours in a 300°F oven transforms them. The fat has lots of time to render, so the skin takes on a paper-thin crispness and a golden brown hue. The meat becomes so tender and succulent, you can cut it with a fork. A couple heads of garlic roasted with the chicken get soft, sweet, and creamy, then mashed and mixed with the pan juices and a little Dijon to make a savory sauce. It’s so comforting, so easy, and so flavorful, it might be enough to lure me out of my post-holiday burnout.
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Claire Lower
Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.
