Whole Chicken Recipe: How to Cook 8 Meals in 2 Hours Without Breaking a Sweat

Alright gentlemen, it’s day one of Cooking for Men 101. You have your kitchen cooking utensils, right? Today we’re going to learn about roasting and make a really low-maintenance meal with this whole chicken recipe, a workhorse that will keep your plate and belly full.

Roasting

Roasting, like grilling and broiling, is a method of cooking that uses dry heat, only in this case it is in a closed environment. At its best, roasting food results in a crispy outside and a moist inside. It can be used for most meats and root vegetables such as carrots and sweet potatoes. Plus, it makes your home smell amazing!

The First Rule of LMVM Cooking

This recipe is simple in that there are no fancy ingredients or equipment necessary. It’s easy in that prep time is minimal, and you only need to flip once and increase the heat once. And it’s cheap. (Whole chicken goes for less than $2 / lb and lemons, butter, salt, and pepper can be had for not much more.)

Most people are used to getting skinless, boneless chicken breasts because of the pervasive “low fat” fad diet. Unfortunately for them (but fortunately for you) this drives up the price of chicken breasts while keeping the price of the fattier parts such as the thighs low. On top of that, buying anything whole will cost much less than the parts will. So buying whole chickens is the way to go to save tons of money. Plus, roasting a whole bird will help you get in touch with your inner caveman. Trust me.

Best of all, this recipe can be scaled up. It only takes an extra (or bigger) pan to roast two chickens at a time as it does one.

This brings me to the first rule of LMVM cooking:

1. 1. Batch your cooking to make massive amounts of food at once.

It takes no more time or effort to cook a ton of food than it does to cook a little bit. If you cook two chickens, you have eight meals. Throw one chicken in the freezer and one in the fridge and you are set for a week.

I’d like to give a tip of the hat to Marcella Hazan. This roast chicken recipe is adapted from The Essentials of Italian Cooking, for my money the best all-purpose Italian cookbook ever written.

The Ingredients

• 1 whole chicken
• 1 large or 2 small lemons
• salt and pepper

The Recipe

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Remove the giblets from the chicken, rinse it inside and out in cold water, and drain. Cover both the inside and the outside of the chicken in salt and pepper. Roll the lemon(s) on the counter and stab all over with a knife. Place the lemon(s) inside the chicken.
2. Put the chicken face down on the roasting pan and place in the oven for 15 minutes. Flip it face up and roast for another 15 minutes. Turn the oven up to 400 degrees and grab a beer. Or just find something else to do for a while. The hard part is over. As a general rule, you’ll need about 25 minutes per pound of chicken total in the oven.
3. When the chicken’s done, remove from the oven and put on a cutting board to sit for 15 to 20 minutes. Then carve away.

Extra Credit: Makin’ Gravy

The liquid remaining in the pan after making this roast is pretty tasty to pour on your dinner, but should you want to go the extra mile, you can make some incredible gravy without much more effort.

Ingredients

• 1 cup chicken stock or red wine
• Salt and pepper
• 2 T butter, cut into small pieces

The Recipe

1. While the chicken is cooling on the cutting board pour off all but about 2 T of the top layer of fat in the pan.
2. Put on the stove on medium heat. Stir for 1 minute.
3. Add the stock or wine and turn up to medium-high. Boil and scrape the bottom until about half the liquid has evaporated off.
4. Remove from heat. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add butter in bit by bit while stirring until melted.
5. Pour on chicken just before eating. Dee-lish!

The Variations

If you ever get bored with this recipe, here’s some variations you can use to spice things up:

• Rub some butter inside and outside the chicken to make it even more tasty.
• Stuff fresh herbs such as thyme, rosemary, parsley, or bay leaf inside the chicken.
• If you have dried spices, sprinkle them on the outside before cooking.
• After you pour off the fat to make gravy, throw in a little chopped onion.

Roasted whole chicken recipe… That doesn’t sound so hard now, does it?

Tagged as: chicken, cooking rules, meat, pareto principle, recipes