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Have you also seen the show where they cook the whole chicken stuffed with vegetables? It looks so delicious, right? What if you can cook a perfectly roasted chicken at home and can stop dreaming about it. There is a reason chicken is the most popular meat around the world. Whether fried, broiled, sauteed, poached, braised, or boiled, it remains delicious. Roasting chicken is one of the more ancient forms of cooking chicken that is still used today.
But how to cook this chicken properly is the most asked question, how to let the juices infuse in the chicken to make it tender. So try these tips to make the perfect roaster chicken:
9 Tips for Roasting a Chicken to Perfection
Brine Your Chicken
The idea of roasting a chicken seems very difficult, but in reality, you just need to plan. Seasoning your chicken a day or two before you plan to cook, whether it is with a dry brine, wet brine, or marinade. It will allow the salt to penetrate all parts of your chicken. When it does, the salt not only flavours the chicken, it also helps keep the chicken moist by altering the meat’s protein strands to retain more water.
Image Credit: Freepik
Add Dairy
Bringing your chicken in buttermilk, sour milk, or yoghurt can further tenderize the meat and add flavour. Brushing clarified butter onto the chicken skin just before roasting will create deeper caramelization due to the sugars present in milk.
Image Credit: Freepik
Rub Aromatics Under The Skin
For a flavour boost, use your fingers to loosen the skin away from the chicken breasts and thighs. You can add herb butter, fresh herbs, or extra marinade into these skin pockets to trap flavour between the meat and the skin.
Cook Stuffing Separately
Stuffing your chicken will increase cooking time and potentially result in an unevenly cooked bird. If you want to serve stuffing with your chicken, cook it separately.
Image Credit: Freepik
Temper The Chicken Before Roasting
Tempering food is a simple but critical step that involves bringing an ingredient to room temperature before cooking so that it cooks more evenly. Tempering is important with most proteins, but it is essential when oven-roasting large cuts of meat because it allows the meat to cook efficiently.
Image Credit: Freepik
Prepare The Chicken
Do not just throw your chicken in the oven. Take a minute to trim and tie it. Tie the legs up to help the thighs brown, and remove the wing tips, which tend to burn. If you prefer to leave the wing tips on, cover them with aluminium foil or parchment paper, or tuck the wing tips underneath the shoulders to prevent them from burning. Some cooks like to spatchcock, or butterfly, their chicken so that it can lie flat on a baking sheet. This increases the chicken’s surface area for faster, more even cooking.
Place Your Chicken In The Back Corner Of The Oven
One way to deal with the fact that different parts of the chicken cook differently is to take advantage of the fact that different parts of the oven are hotter than others; the back of the oven tends to be hotter than the front. Position your chicken in the very back corner of your oven, with the legs pointing straight into the corner and the breasts pointing toward the center of the oven. Partway through cooking, switch the chicken to the other corner so that the left and right sides of the bird are cooked evenly.
Image Credit: Freepik
Start Hot, Then Cool Down
High oven temperatures will cause browning but can also lead to overcooking. To prevent this, start your chicken in a hot oven. Once the chicken starts to brown, turn down the heat to maintain the perfect temperature.
Image Credit: Freepik
Let The Chicken Rest
Once the chicken is cooked it should be set aside for a while. This is because of carryover cooking which means that larger cuts of meat will continue to cook after you take them out of the oven. For a three- to four-pound chicken, ten to twenty minutes should be enough.
If you are planning to cook chicken next time, try these tips to make the perfectly roasted chicken.
