Foundations: 1 - Roast Chicken

A fine place to start

Hello and welcome to the first instalment of Foundations!

The idea behind Foundations is simple; I want to teach you what I know about cooking. These are the fundamentals, the building blocks, the stuff that once you understand it, will allow you to become the kind of cook who can open a cupboard or fridge and make something delicious without using a recipe. If you haven’t already, you might like to read the introductory piece explaining this project in more detail here.

---

We’ve all been there. It’s 8:15pm, you’ve just got home famished and opened the fridge to find a few a few limp sticks of celery, half a jar of beans and a single solitary sausage on a plate. You google ‘sausage bean celery dish’ and find Brenda’s Tasty Treats Blog .org.com.usa which somehow, inexplicably, has a recipe using those exact ingredients. But to even get to the recipe (which is all measured in cups and fluid ounces and finger lengths), you have to navigate a minefield of popups and banner ads for Kenwood mixers and boner pills and then wade through a 4 page quagmire of dreadful drivel about why this recipe even exists and how its a family favourite. ‘The grandkids just can’t wait to come round and eat Gee’Ma Brenda’s Super Sausage Surprise!’. I bet they can’t.

I can tell you now that despite my occasional propensity for verbosity, this newsletter will not follow that format. Yes, there is quite a lot of writing before you get to the recipe, but it is, I hope, interesting, relevant and useful. That said, if you just want to roast a chicken you could totally skip it all and scroll straight down to the how, but then you’ll lose out on learning about the small dogs in hamster wheels that the Tudors used to power rotisseries, and you don’t want to miss that do you?

Intro

We’re going to kick Foundations off with a roast chicken. This felt like a good place to start because it’s such a staple in so many homes, it’s easy, and there are some good lessons to learn along the way. This method not only gives you a delicious roast chicken in a shorter time than usual, but makes its own gravy in the process. We’ll also take a wider look at roasting as a cooking method, what sets it apart from other ways of cooking, what else you can roast and the best way to do it.

I feel like a lot of recipes use cooking terminology in the title of a dish, but don’t always explain why or what those terms mean. ‘Beef Braised in Red Wine’ sounds great, but what about it makes it ‘braised’? ‘Poached Chicken’ is somehow more appealing than ‘Boiled Chicken’ but why, what’s the difference? Let’s dive into roasting and discuss.

Note: To roast a chicken really well, you’ll need a meat thermometer. In fact, a huge portion of this recipe will be redundant if you don’t have one and I make no apologies for that. You can pick up a meat thermometer like this one for a tenner, and it will make your life so, so much easier and take all of the guesswork out of cooking meat. You can use them for all kinds of things, steak, bread etc. Every single chef I know owns one and uses it constantly. You should too.

What is roasting

Roasting is a way of cooking food using dry, indirect and diffused heat applied evenly on all sides. Most of the time, this is done in an oven. So what does that actually mean?

‘Dry heat’ is any kind of cooking that doesn’t use liquid. Terms like roasting, baking, browning, searing and grilling are all examples of ‘dry heat’. The opposite, as you might have guessed, is ‘wet heat’ which could be a 1980’s Miami porno but also refers to cooking with liquid. Boiling, poaching, sous vide and steaming are all examples of wet heat cooking.

‘Indirect’ heat means that the food being cooked is not in direct contact with the heat source. Roasting and baking are both indirect cooking methods because, like an MP in Parliament, the food is surrounded by hot air. Pan-frying is a direct cooking method as the food is in direct contact with the hot pan. Terms like ‘browning’ can be achieved via both direct or indirect heat, as both methods are able to colour (brown) the surface of the food.

‘Diffused heat’ is what separates baking and roasting from grilling, for example. This is because in an oven, the heat is distributed evenly around the food through the air (diffused), often assisted by a fan, whereas when you grill, the heat is transferred from the heat source straight to the food. Deep-frying and pan-frying are both direct cooking methods because in both cases the food is in contact with the heat source (the hot oil or the hot pan) however deep-frying uses diffused heat, because the hot oil evenly distributes the heat around the food, whereas pan-frying does not, the heat comes from the pan on one side.

Roasting vs Baking

You’ll notice above that both roasting and baking match the criteria for cooking via dry, indirect and diffused heat. So what’s the difference between them? A lot of resources will tell you that higher heat = roasting and lower heat = baking but this doesn't work for me. Firstly because you can ‘slow roast’ something, i.e roast it at a lower heat for a longer time, and on the flip side, a lot of baking happens at high temperatures. Good focaccia, for example, should start out in a very hot (250c+) oven to achieve ‘oven spring’ and become light. Oven spring refers to the rapid evaporation of moisture in dough, combined with CO2, and is part of what makes things like focaccia and pizza ‘puff up’ during cooking (and happens best at high temperature). I’m sure we’ll talk more about this down the line.

For me, a better delineation between the two terms is the constitution of the raw ingredients before cooking. Roasting is used to cook whole, solid ingredients like meat or vegetables, and baking is a term better suited to the cooking of soft/wet ingredients like dough, which then take form and structure during cooking. To an extent it’s also semantic preference and there is some overlap, you could refer to ‘baked fennel’ or ‘roasted fennel’ and people would know what you’re getting at.

Origins

This won’t make you better at roasting, but it is interesting

Today, roasting refers almost exclusively to a way of cooking using an oven, but it wasn’t always that way. Roasting is one of the oldest cooking methods in human history, especially in its most rudimental form which is essentially meat on a stick cooked over a flame. In the English language at least, it appears that the definition of roasting has changed slightly in recent history, as cooking methods and technologies have advanced. For a long time, roasting was a blanket term used for pretty much any kind of cooking of impaled meat over/ next to a fire, what we would refer to more specifically now as a spit roast or rotisserie.

Having a stove (and therefore an oven) in your kitchen is a relatively recent idea, and wasn’t commonplace until the 1800’s. It appears that until this point in history, most food cooked in ovens was in the form of baked goods like bread, and ovens as we know them today were really only found in bakeries. As stoves became more widespread, the term ‘roasting’ took on the meaning described above and cooking over a fire became less and less common.

Some Quick Fun Facts Before We Cook a Chicken

Rotisserie cooking requires the regular and even turning of a piece of meat as it cooks. Today, that’s easy, you plug in an electric rotisserie and away you go, but most kitchens in England didn’t have electricity until the 1920’s. So how do you slowly and evenly turn a piece of meat for hours as it cooks? Get someone else to do it for you. Below is an illustration from the Romance of Alexander (1338) and in the bottom right corner, you can see a boy kneeling, rotating the spit handle. This was a common position in the medieval kitchens of large households and was referred to as the ‘spit boy’ or ‘spit jack’. That was his job, to sit there for hours turning the handle to roast a piece of meat he wasn’t allowed to eat. He wouldn’t even have been able to listen to a podcast at the same time. What a life.

Why were we SO bad at drawing people for so long?? His feet are literally on backwards like come on.

Next time you worry that you’re going to be replaced by AI, think of the spit jack boy. Sure, you might lose your job to an advanced algorithm that represents the forefront of collective human ingenuity, powered by an interconnected web of hydro-cooled supercomputers, but at lease you won’t be replaced by a small dog.

That was the fate of the spit jack, and this is the small dog that replaced him. Known as a ‘turnspit’, it was a short legged dog bred specifically to run on a wheel, which turned a gearing mechanism that rotated the rotisserie, an invention of the Tudor kitchen. Below you can see the turnspit in the wheel hanging from the ceiling.

Once fully mechanical rotisseries powered by steam or clockwork came along, the turnspit mechanism faded from use and eventually the breed itself became extinct. RIP little guy, you gave some rich people with bad teeth many delicious juicy meat dinners.

Roasting chicken

Now to the reason you’re here, roasting a chicken. The good news is that the following tips and tricks are useful whatever kind of roasting you’re doing. You could copy this method exactly but swap out the chicken for a leg of lamb, add an extra 20 mins of cooking time and voila, roast lamb leg and gravy.

I couldn’t write a recipe on the internet about cooking a chicken without at least 4 lines in here talking about how important it is to start off with a good chicken, free-range and ideally pasture raised because its A. Tastier, B. Morally superior and C. Environmentally friendlier so here are those 4 lines doing that.

Spatchwhat?

Spatchcocking is the process of cutting a chicken along the spine and flattening it out. It’s very easy and just needs a pair of decent kitchen scissors. You can see me do it in the video for this recipe here but if you want a slightly more in depth guide then have a look here (you’ll notice I only cut along one side of the spine, rather than removing it, because I want to cook the spine along with the chicken ready to use it to make stock next week).

Why do I like to spatchcock a roast chicken? Because I think it makes more sense that roasting the bird whole for a number of reasons. Think about a cow or lamb. A butcher will break that animal down into all kinds of different cuts for different uses, and they’re all cooked differently. You’ve got beef cheeks and skirts which are great for long, slow cooks, fillets which should be cooked hot and fast and eaten rare, lamb legs which are best somewhere in the middle, roasted for an hour and served pink. Well a chicken isn’t so different, just on a smaller scale. Although not as extreme as a cow, different parts of a chicken react differently to being cooked.

Chicken breast is best cooked to around 65c, whereas legs and thighs are considerably tastier cooked closer to 80c. That’s because all of the connective tissue is broken down at higher temperatures and you end up with a much more juicy and succulent bit of meat.

Of course, with a roast chicken, we’re cooking the whole thing at once, which is where spatchcocking comes into its own. With a whole roast chicken, the breasts are sitting at the top, exposed to the most heat. Chicken breast is the leanest part of the animal, without the subcutaneous or intramuscular fat of the legs to protect the meat during cooking, so it sits there on top of the bird getting absolutely mullered. I’m sure everyone reading this has had a mouthful of chicken breast with all the texture and charm of loft insulation, and that’s why. At the same time, the thighs, which in my opinion have the best potential for crispy golden skin, are lost somewhere around the underside of the bird and end up a bit ‘meh’. By spatchcocking, we flatten the bird out to one level, and also roast the whole thing on a trivet (see below) which gives a more even application of heat across the bird.

The Brownie Bake Theory

If you’ve ever cooked a tray of brownies, you’ll notice how the outside cooks faster and becomes crispier, whilst the inside stays soft and wobbly. Well, by spatchcocking our chicken, we’ve rearranged it so that the breasts are on the inside and the darker meat is on the outside. In this way, we’re as close to cooking the 2 parts to different temperatures as possible without actually cooking them separately, and our ‘outside’ meat should reach a higher temperature by the time the breast is cooked.

Another benefit is that flattening the chicken out like this means that the whole cooking process happens much faster, so depending on the size of the chicken you’ll be shaving a good 30 mins off the cooking time.

Lastly, I prefer to break down the cooked chicken in the kitchen and present it ready in a dish, rather than setting down the whole bird down and trying to carve it at the table, which is always a lot more awkward (and I’m pretty sure only exists as a ritual so that Dad’s can use that slightly blunt carving knife they got as a wedding present). Because of this, the chicken being cooked flat doesn’t affect the end presentation in any way.

Resting

Much like you, roast chicken is better after a good roast. Resting is the make or break for a lot of meat cookery. No matter how much chef’s wang on about it, it’s so often overlooked at home - 5 minutes is simply not enough. When you cook meat at high heat, as we are here, all of the juices are ‘pushed’ into the middle of the meat through the muscle fibres, which is why it’s so important to let that meat rest after cooking, so that the muscle fibres relax and the moisture is dispersed back through the meat. If you’ve seen someone cut into a hot steak and their cutting board is swimming with bloody liquid, that’s why. Don’t be scared of a good rest. If your kitchen is reasonably warm, the chicken can sit out for 20 mins on the side and still be lovely and hot and juicy by the time it comes to eating.

One Pan Gravy

We’re going to put a bunch of roughly chopped veggies in the bottom of the chicken cooking pan, along with a splash of water. These veggies are going to flavour that combination of water and chicken juices as they cook, a bit like when you make a stock (more on that next week) meaning that we have the base of a great sauce without any extra work. The veggies also act as a trivet, raising the chicken from the base of the pan and keeping the cooking more even. It’s really important to skim the fat from this leftover cooking liquid before making it into a sauce, otherwise it will be really greasy and unpleasant. You can do this by tilting the pan slightly and spooning it out into a bowl (keep it!).

Carry-Over Cooking

The second function of resting is something called ‘carry-over cooking’ which is a pretty straightforward bit of physics. When you cook any meat, there’s a desired goal in terms of doneness, whether that’s rare, medium, or cooked through. With chicken, it’s important that the meat is properly cooked to make it safe to eat, but it’s also important that it’s not overcooked, which makes it not worth eating.

Food safety guidelines will tell you that the safe internal temperature for chicken is 74c, and that’s because at 74c salmonella is killed pretty much instantly. But you can achieve the same level of pasteurisation at lower temperatures as long as the meat is held at that temperature for long enough, and it will be much tastier (this is specific to the breasts, the legs as I mentioned earlier, want to be cooked hotter). For example, chicken breast held at 65c for 3 minutes is just as safe as chicken breast cooked to 74c.

On top of that, because of carry-over cooking, if you take a chicken out of the oven once the breast has already reached 74c, you’ll end up with really overcooked chicken. That’s because essentially, the meat continues cooking once removed from the oven, as the heat continues to radiate inwards from the hotter outside. Luckily, the solution is simple. Remove your chicken beforehand and let carry-over cooking finish the job for you.

I know people who pull their chicken from the oven at 62/63c and let carry over take the meat to 65c. If you’re confident then feel free to do that, just makes sure it sits at 65c for at least 3 minutes. This is how you can make wickedly juicy chicken. I err on the side of caution and use a simple and safe method which is this: Pull your chicken out of the oven once the inside of the breast reaches 65c. Because of carryover cooking, we know that the internal temperature will continue to rise by a degree or 2, and easily clear the ‘65 for 3 minutes’ rule. This way you can be certain it’s going to be cooked through and safe, but also a hell of a lot nicer than if you cooked it to 74c.

The Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 Whole Chicken

• 1 Large Onion or 2 Shallots, roughly chopped

• 1 Carrot, roughly chopped

• 1 Stick of Celery, roughly chopped

• 1 Whole Head of Garlic, halved through the equator

• 1 Lemon cut into quarters

• A Sprig of Thyme or Rosemary

• 150ml. White Wine

• 1 Tsp. Cornstarch

Method:

Use a paper towel to remove any surface moisture from your chicken, then spatchcock it (see links above) and pop it onto a tray or plate and leave it skin side up, uncovered, for an hour to come to room temperature. This will also help dry the skin out a bit which will make it more crispy.

While the chicken warms up, roughly chop your veggies and lemon and add them to the roasting tray or shallow pan that you’re going to cook the chicken in (make sure the chicken fits, but you don’t want loads of excess room) along with 100ml of water and the thyme.

Preheat your oven to full whack, 250c.

Once at room temperature, rub the chicken all over skin side with olive oil and season very generously on both sides with salt. Now place the chicken skin side up into your pan or tray of veggies, and put the whole lot into the oven. Close the over door, then immediately reduce the heat to 180c.

Now is a good time to get anything you’re eating with the chicken ready. Some buttery new potatoes with a bit of fresh mint and a well dressed green salad wouldn’t be a bad idea.

After half an hour, check the internal temperature of the breasts, and then monitor from there. Once no part of the chicken reads under 65c, pull it out of the oven and onto a rack or tray to rest.

Now, remove the veggies from the pan and discard. Use a spoon to skim as much fat as possible from the surface of the remaining liquid. Keep this in a small container in the fridge, chicken fat is great for cooking with and we’ll use it in a chicken soup recipe very soon.

You should be left with quite a nice amount of liquid in the pan, but if it’s less than 100ml, add a half a small glass of water. If the pan or tray you cooked the chicken in can go straight on the hob then place it on there over a medium heat, if not, transfer the liquid to a saucepan and do the same.

Add your white wine, bring to a simmer and reduce by about half. Now combine your tsp of cornstarch with a tsp of water, mix into a paste and then stir into the gravy while it simmers to thicken slightly, then remove from the heat. Taste it, you might not need to add salt because of how well salted the chicken was, but don’t be afraid to give it an extra pinch. I also like an extra squeeze of fresh lemon.

Carve the chicken by removing the legs and then cutting between the thigh and drumstick. Then take off the breasts, which you could cut into nice thick slices or leave whole. Place the chicken into a warm serving dish (you can garnish it with some parsley and lemon) and then pour over a few spoons of the gravy, keeping the rest to pour table side.

Grab a freezer bag and put the carcass in there along with the wings, and then after dinner chuck in the bones from the thighs and drumsticks too (don’t worry about people having eaten around the bones, they’re going to be simmered for hours in boiling water). Keep all of that in the freezer because next week I’m going to teach you how to make it all into stock.

End

That’s it! A truly delicious roast chicken and gravy. I hope you found all of this as interesting to read as I did to write. If you make it, please let me know/ send a pic/ tell a friend. If you have any questions, please drop them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to go back to you. See you back here next week.