Easy Roast Chicken

Degree of Difficulty: Easy
Prep Time: 5 min (if you don’t break down the chicken yourself)
Total Cook Time: about 45 min

A chef is entitled to be lazy every once in while, or so I hope. When I feel especially lazy, there are few things easier to make than a roasted chicken. You can usually find whole chickens that have been cut up into 8 pieces (breast, thigh, leg, wing…2 pieces of each) at any grocery store. I find that it is cheaper and more fun (if your idea of playing with a chicken carcass is fun) to buy a whole chicken and cut it up once you get home. Plus, when you buy the whole chicken you usually get a packet of giblets and you can keep the carcass and make chicken stock. The example photo at the bottom of this post represents my first ever attempt at breaking down my own chicken. When my chicken doesn’t look like it was broken down my someone that just enrolled in barber college, I’ll be sure to write a step-by-step post that’ll show you the easiest way to break down a chicken.

Here’s what else you need in addition to the aforementioned chicken:

2 lemons
2-3 garlic cloves – very finely minced
basil – we always have the Trader Joe’s brand that comes frozen in ready to use individual servings…I use 2 of these but you can substitute about 1 tbsp of the dried stuff
1 tbsp dried oregano
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
paprika, salt and fresh cracked black pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Cut the lemons in half and squeeze the juice into a small bowl. Add the garlic, basil, oregano, balsamic vinegar, and olive oil to the bowl and mix well. Arrange the chicken, skin side up, in a roasting pan. Pour this mixture over the chicken, making sure to rub it all over the individual chicken parts. Sprinkle some paprika, salt and pepper over the top of the chicken and stick it in the oven. Slice up the lemons and throw them into the roasting pan with the chicken. If I have some chicken stock handy, I throw a little into the bottom of the pan, but that is not necessary. I put a thermometer into the thickest part of the chicken thigh (that takes the longest to cook), then stick the pan in the oven on a middle rack. Check on it after about 35 min or so. The chicken should be ready when the thermometer registers 165 degrees and the juices from the meat run clear. I like to crisp the skin up at the end of cooking if it is a bit rubbery. To do this, turn the oven to its broil setting, move the roasting pan with the chicken up so that the heating element is just a bit over the chicken, and broil for about 5 min. Be careful at this point…to much broiling and the chicken will dry out.

The beauty of roasting the chicken like this, skin on, and including dark meat pieces is that the meat should produce lots of liquid and be pretty juicy when it is done cooking. Here’s what the chicken looked like right after it came out of the oven:

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