There is only one thing better than serving a perfectly cooked roast chicken, and that is someone else serving you a perfectly cooked roast chicken. We have cooked many a roast in our time, and this is everything we know about doing so properly.
It is always better, if at all possible, to take whole chicken out of the fridge at least 30 minutes, and ideally 60 minutes, before you want to cook it. This allows the meat to come up to room temperature – if the centre is of the bird is very chilled when you put it in the oven, it will take longer for the heat to penetrate the meat, which can either mean undercooked inner meat or overcooked breast meat.
If you’re roasting a chicken in the oven (for air fryers, see below), the usual rule is to calculate the cooking time as 20 minutes per 500g at 180ºC, plus a 20-minute blast of higher heat at the beginning of cooking, usually at 200ºC.
However, some birds do need slightly different treatment: our 100-day old chickens, raised slowly for us (and only us) by the wonderful Botterill farming family in Leicestershire, do better cooked at a slightly lower temperature, and for longer.
This is our very favourite recipe when it comes to roasting our 100-day chickens. First, use your hands to coat the surface of the bird in a neutral cooking oil and then season generously with salt, including inside the cavity.
Cook the chicken in a deep roasting dish, with the chicken on a rack. (If you like, you can place a roughly chopped onion, a split head of garlic or some chunks of celery and carrot in the bottom of the tray, to add flavour to the gravy, later.) Lay a few rashers of streaky bacon over the breast, and then place a piece of foil loosely over the top, and just covering the legs. This will stay in place for about an hour and will stop the breast and thighs from drying out.
For our 100-day chickens, which develop strong muscles and bigger legs because they get so much more time roaming outdoors than most poultry, we recommend 10 minutes at 220º at the beginning of cooking, and then 30 minutes per 500g at 160ºC, which is lower and slower than many roast chicken recipes. When you turn the heat down, add 500ml of chicken or vegetable stock or a mixture of stock and white wine, to the tin. This helps keep the meat juicy, and can be used in the gravy.
After an hour, remove the foil and bacon. Our 100-day birds have just the right amount of fat under the skin to guarantee a roast chicken with crisp, golden skin. Check if the chicken is cooked (see below) and give it an extra 10 minutes, or more, as needed. When done, remove from the oven and transfer the chicken to a serving dish, cover loosely with foil and set aside (away from draughts) to rest for at least 15 minutes, while you make the gravy.
Our Yorkshire chickens roast very well, especially if covered in a little bacon, and are reared carefully to ensure they develop a generous amount of breast meat. These birds are particularly tender and very well-suited to roasting, (they doesn’t lend themselves to casseroling, coq au vin or poule-au-pot because they don’t need long, slow cooking). These are the chickens we use in our own rotisserie and they roast wonderfully while not needing as long in the oven as a 100-day chicken. They are an economical choice for a very fine roast chicken. For these chickens, oil, season and place in a roasting dish as above, then calculate the roasting time as 20 minutes per 500g at 180ºC, plus 20 minutes at 200ºC at the beginning, meaning a 2 kg bird will need to roast for a total of 1 hour and 40 minutes.
It’s easy to tell whether a roast chicken is properly cooked. Using a meat thermometer during takes a lot of the guesswork out of preparing meat, whether you’re making a roast chicken or a rib of beef. If you have a thermometer, the general rule for food safety is that cooked chicken needs to reach 74ºC when the thermometer is pushed into a thick section of meat, like the breast, right down to the bone. Some cooks find cooking to this temperature results in dry meat, especially when roasting smaller birds; if so, it’s usually safe to cook chicken to 72ºC or 73ºC as long as you are confident every part of the bird is that hot and that it stays that hot for around 5 minutes (meaning any potentially harmful bacteria is destroyed).
If you don’t have a meat thermometer, there are several checks you can do to see if your roast is cooked instead: wiggle the joints of the bird and if cooked they will feel loose; use a sharp knife to cut between the thigh and leg joint or between the thigh and breast, then check that the juices are clear and that the meat doesn’t look pink or fleshy; steam should also rise up from where you’ve made the cut.
It may sound paradoxical, but resting a roast chicken for 15-20 minutes after cooking also helps to ensure that the residual heat trapped inside the meat has a chance to reach every part of the bird, while the juices redistribute themselves and the meat itself relaxes after cooking.
You can, but it depends on the size of your air fryer vs that of the chicken you want to cook. Most air fryers won’t be able to roast a whole bird weighing more than 1.4 kg, and some are only big enough for small joints of meat. Because an air fryer provides drier heat in a much smaller environment than a traditional oven, the air fryer roast chicken rule is cook for 12-15 minutes per 500g, meaning an air fryer roast chicken is much quicker to cook. Start with the chicken upside down, so the breast is facing the bottom of the air fryer (this keeps as much moisture as possible in the breast meat), then turn it breast side up after 30 minutes.
When the chicken is roasted and happily resting, spoon off the fat, leaving behind any liquid which has collected in the bottom of the tin, and if you roasted any vegetables in the tin for this purpose, leave them and any herbs you’ve used there too. (Do not throw away the fat! It is full of flavour, and if you want to do anything with the leftover roast chicken, onions fried in chicken fat are a wonderful start.) If you prefer a slightly thicker gravy, work a little cornflour into a dessert spoonful of fat at the end of the tin and then gradually mix this into the meat juices over a very low heat until everything begins to thicken, scraping up anything which stuck to the tin. (You can add a splash of white wine at this point, if you like.) If you have been preparing a few vegetables to go with the bird, add the vegetable water to the pan, if not a bit of chicken or vegetable stock will work. Bring the whole pan to a very gentle simmer until the gravy has thickened. Taste and season with salt and pepper before straining into a warmed jug or gravy boat.
Although a very good roast chicken, cooked simply but very well, is hard to surpass, there are any number of ways to roast a chicken, and we love them all. You could make a herbed garlic butter and gently push it under the skin before roasting. You could tuck sprigs of rosemary into the cavity along with some wedges of unwaxed lemon. You could peel and cook hunks of potato beneath and around the chicken, or fill the tray with carrots, sweet potatoes, parsnips and thyme, then mash them with butter to serve.
For Tim, a roast is not a roast without a serving of very buttery bread sauce (which really should have nearly as much butter as bread, says Tim). We all love roast potatoes, plus things like mashed swede, roast carrots or a few parsnips, and some purple sprouting broccoli.
The glory of a roast chicken is that unless you’re feeding a very hungry crowd of people, it is extremely rare to finish every last morsel. This means that you have an array of options for the following week. If you’ve got more meat than you can use up in a couple of days, strip it from the bones and freeze it. Don’t throw away the skin, as you can chop it roughly then gently fry it until crisp and scatter it over tomorrow’s warm chicken salad or chicken and mushroom risotto. Our other leftover chicken favourites include chicken pot pie with a puff pastry lid, chicken and avocado sandwiches with crispy onions, spicy chicken nachos and miso broth with noodles, chicken and greens.
If reheating roast chicken, be sure to warm it slowly but thoroughly, and with a little liquid if possible, as getting it too hot, too fast can make the meat tough.
