BVC Eats: Roasted chicken with gravy

Roasted Chicken with Gravy

It may be thought that roasting a chicken is dead easy. Not so, but far otherwise. Every cook has an orthodox method of plain-roasting chicken and this is mine. You are welcome to mention yours in the comments, with or without links. I stand by my method.

5+lb roasting chicken, I prefer Amish or organic
Large sweet onion, peeled and sliced in thin wedges
Kosher salt
Ground black pepper
(secret ingredient!) Marmite

Preheat oven to 450f. While it preheats, prep the bird.

Remove giblets, neck, etc., if any, from the bird’s cavity. Wash them and set them aside.

Rinse the chicken in warm water, inside and out. Lots of rinsing. You do not want to know how chickens are processed. Just wash it real good.

Remove any big gobs of fat from around the cavity. Dry them and set them aside.

Rub chicken inside and out with salt and pepper.

Lay chicken breast-side-up on a rack in a roasting pan.

Sprinkle onion slices around the chicken. Let ’em fall through the rack, that’s fine. Lay the giblets and neck over the onion, i.e., around edges of pan but on the rack.

On a board, slice the extra chicken fat into strips. Lay the strips across the chicken breast. The fat will melt and cook across the breast, basting and adding goodness both to the breast skin and to the gravy (below).

Don’t poke holes in the chicken skin. If you leave the skin whole, it will serve as a container and steam the chicken meat, leaving it juicy and tender. If you puncture the skin, the juices will run out, your chicken will dry out, and you will be sad. Don’t worry. The juices will still be there, and they will run out when you rest and carve the bird, at which point they can be retrieved for gravy-making.

To that point, I don’t stuff a bird before roasting – not even with a raw potato, an orange, an onion, or an old boot. You want the hot air to circulate as much as reasonably possible inside the bird, so that you don’t get the Dreaded Pink Juices. DPJ will appear even when the bird is roasted to a fare-thee-well, but some diners panic.

Roast at 450 for 15-20 minutes.

Reduce oven heat to 350f. Roast for an additional 20 minutes per lb.

When a meat thermometer stuck into the thickest part of the bird comes back at 165f or higher, it’s done. Or, using my grandma’s method, wiggle a leg-bone, and when it wiggles very loosely or just pulls right out, it’s done.

Pour the juices out of the bird into the roasting pan. (I stick a stout metal spatula into the cavity and lift the bird, then let it drain while holding it over the pan. This prevents bird disintegration, which can happen if you use a meat fork or two.) Put the bird on a plate or carving board. Let it rest 10 minutes before carving.

Gravy

Remove the blackened giblets and neck, which have done their job. Be sure to leave in the blackened onion shreds.

Remove the rack from the pan, or, if it’s got good juices and bits of skin and stuff stuck to it, flip it over in the pan, pour in water to cover, place the pan over high heat, and boil and scrape the goodies off the rack. That stuff is black gold.

DO NOT skim off the fat. What kind of Philistine would do that? The chicken worked hard to make that delicious fat. Have some respect.

Keep the flame high. Boil the juices and scrape the pan so that any burnt crunchy bits are released and start dissolving in the hot juices.

If you bought a nice fatty chicken and remembered the onion, you should have some very dark pre-gravy stock in the pan now. If it isn’t dark, mix a tablespoon of Marmite in 2 T of hot water until it dissolves – may have to use your finger here – and stir thoroughly into the gravy.

Using a French whisk, whisk 1 teaspoon of flour at a time into the boiling juices. If you keep the whisk moving and shake the flour over it, that’ll help prevent lumps. Once the gravy starts to thicken, stop adding flour, and boil it a little longer to cook the floury taste out – about a minute.

Then add ½ to 1 cup heavy cream, half-and-half, or whole milk. Don’t be a fussbudget about fat. Fat has flavor. Boil the gravy a bit longer to cook out the milky taste. (If it gets too thick to stir, you’ve cooked it too long. Add more cream or stock, quick, and whisk like mad!)

Secret #2: Pour the gravy into a blender (careful, only fill halfway, so do it in stages if necessary!) and blend until it’s smooth. This makes a deeply umami gravy with an amazing fluffy texture.

Serve hot. Nice over stuffing, mashed potatoes, chicken of course, biscuits, or eat it with a spoon. Reheats well.

Chicken Skin
and other post-prandial matters

A word about chicken skin. Chicken skin, properly crisp, salted and peppered, is better than chicken meat, in my opinion.

After the meal, I slit the skin around the chicken neck (remember the chicken neck?) and lay it flat, inside down, on a doubled paper towel on a microwaveable plate. (Dump the skinless roasted chicken neck into the stock pot with the carcass.)

I generally put the remains of a whole chicken into the stock pot after one meal, because Amish chickens tend to be small (serve two to four people one meal) and because I love having a bit of chicken meat in with my frozen stock. This adds immensely to any soup you might make later with the stock.

If there is ANY skin left this means your dinner guests had terrible priorities. Good news for the cook at stock time, however. Remove all the skin, whether it is crispy or not, before putting the rest of the carcass in the pot.

Lay all the bits of skin same as the neck skin, inside down, pebbly side up, on a double thickness of paper towel on a microwaveable plate. Salt and pepper to taste. Cover with another paper towel. Microwave all that for a minute at a time, until the skin is crisp and most of the fat has rendered off and soaked into the paper towel. Mmm, crunchy, greasy, salty, nummy!

If this sounds unappetizing and unhealthy, I wash my hands of you.

Stock

A roasted chicken is wasted unless you make stock with the carcass. This can happen after the first use of the chicken, even when there’s lots of meat left on it. Good! You can add that to the frozen stock to make future soups awesome. Or pick it clean first, your choice.

I don’t flavor a basic stock. The bird or beast is generally salted and peppered before roasting, so that’ll have to do. Later, when using the stock, I’ll flavor it.

There’s something called an Iron Fish, which is a little fish-shaped chunk of iron that fits into your palm. It comes from China. You put it in the bottom of your stock pot when boiling up stock and it adds iron to your diet slowly. Yes, it will rust. This is good. It means the iron is actually coming off the fish and getting into your food. I was recommended to get one by my nutritionist, and I’ve been using it for about six months. Jury’s still out. YMMV. Just sayin’.

Keep the carcass well covered with water. Use a pot that holds a good 1.5 go 2 gallons of water. If I’m making bone broth I may add a tablespoon of vinegar, but for a bird, and for the first boil, no. Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer for a couple of hours. If you don’t have a chance to decant the stock into freezer containers, you can leave it on the stove and bring it to a boil the following day. This may help dissolve the good stuff, too. Don’t let it go more than two days.

After one boil I generally toss the bones and rags (well, I put ’em out for the crows), but if the bird was exceptionally fatty and there happens to be skin I didn’t get around to eating, and especially if the ligament and cartilage bits have turned clear but haven’t dissolved, I will cool the stock, drain it off into pint cartons and freeze it, and then refill the pot and re-boil the chicken remains, which gives me a clear, thin stock with those goodies extracted. I’m kinda cheap about animal bits. I want to use everything but the squeal. It’s an issue, being an animal lover and a carnivore, and that’s my compromise.