The Best Roast Chicken You’ll Ever Make (Restaurant-Quality) | Epicurious 101

Hi, I'm Ann Ziada, professional chef and culinary instructor, and today I'm gonna show you the best way to roast chicken. We'll be going over techniques the pros use to get perfect, juicy, crispy chicken. This is roast chicken 101. Common pitfalls when it comes to roasting chicken is that the breast gets dried out, the skin gets too soggy, and the thighs are undercooked. Flipping the chicken halfway through is gonna allow for a juicier chicken breast. It's going to allow for everything to get nice and browned and crispy. So you're really getting the best of all the different techniques when you flip it. What we're gonna do is dry brine the chicken, and it's not as intimidating as it sounds. So I'm gonna start by drying the chicken. I wanna pat it very well dry, get all this moisture off the skin so that the skin can get really nice and crispy. And you can see it looks less glossy too. I'm just checking inside the cavity. Sometimes there's little giblets or something to take out a little piece of fat. Also gonna dry inside the cavity to get rid of any excess water that will also make it steam. So the night before you plan on cooking it, take it out, dry it off, season it, and then put it back in the fridge overnight. This will give it enough time for the salt to permeate through the chicken while drying out the skin and retaining the moisture inside the bird. Salting the chicken. I'm gonna be pretty generous with it. As much as you can remember or plan ahead to do it the night before, it's gonna make the world of a difference. Season the back. If you only have time to let it rest for eight hours or four hours or even an hour, do what you can. It's gonna make a difference. We're gonna get inside the cavity too. Nice little sprinkle of salt and some pepper too. Now we're gonna add some herbs. This is the breast side up. You can see it kind of looks like a heart shape. The wings will be on the top and then the legs are on the bottom. That's how you know you have the right side facing. I'm gonna create a little pocket with my fingers. So I'm gonna push my finger between the skin and the meat on both sides of the breast. So I've created a little pocket here for our herbs to go. Today we're just gonna use thyme. It'll take a few sprigs. We're gonna stuff it inside between the skin and the breast. I like to just use thyme instead of thyme and butter or olive oil. There's enough fat in the skin that it will get really nice and crispy. We're also gonna add a little olive oil later when we cook it. But this way we just get a really beautiful, fresh herb flavor. I'm not gonna stuff anything inside the cavity. At the end of the day, if we're adding ingredients inside the chicken, we're really adding moisture inside the chicken. And then it's gonna steam. They add a lot of aroma. Your kitchen's gonna smell lovely, but it's gonna create a soggier chicken. As this cooks, the fat in the skin is going to heat up the herbs as well. And that's gonna drip over and it's going to infuse flavor all around. Tuck the wings right behind the neck bone. Otherwise you have this small piece sticking out in the oven. And this is what's gonna burn up very quickly. And we want it to cook nice and evenly. So now he's laying lounged out comfortably. I have this on a wire rack on a sheet pan. It's gonna allow more air to circulate under the bird, which is gonna allow it to dry out nice and evenly overnight. It's gonna arrange it so it fits on the tray evenly. And we're gonna go in the fridge. The bird has been in the fridge for 24 hours, dry brining. And I'm gonna start by preheating my oven to 475. And I'm gonna preheat the cast iron pan that we're cooking it into. In the oven for a few minutes. This is our chicken. Just took it out of the fridge. You can see it already looks quite different from yesterday. The skin is tauter and it's more dried out. It also looks a little cooked, even though it still looks very raw. So let's get the preheated cast iron out of the oven. I wanna be very careful because it is very hot. So I'm keeping that on the handle for now. We're preheating it. So the moment that the bird hits the pan, it's gonna start to sear. It's gonna start cooking. If the pan is not hot and you put the chicken in directly, it's gonna start to get wet and steam rather than have a nice sear to it. So it's gonna get a little softer. It's not gonna cook as evenly. Do a little bit of oil on the bottom of the pan. Let's get the bird in. We're gonna do breast side up. Put it in the oven for about 30 minutes and then take it out and flip it when we start to see some caramelization occur. So it's been about 30 minutes. So we can do our first flip for the chicken. Every bird is gonna be a little different as far as the size goes and the temperature of your ovens might vary. So we always give a range for times, but you really wanna look for indicators. So it looks like it's nice and golden along the top. It's not fully cooked, but that's totally fine. We're gonna flip it. So this way the bottom will cook as well and it will prevent the breast from drying out. So there's gonna be a lot more moisture in the thighs and in the legs and it's going to drip down into the breast so it cooks evenly and it stays nice and moist. And then we're also gonna flip it again for the last five or 10 minutes of cooking so the breast gets a little bit crispy at the end. Let's check our bird. So it cooked an additional 20 minutes breast side down and then for the last five minutes, I flipped it over so the breast can get a little bit more coloring again. So we flipped it twice and now this looks beautiful. It should look nice and golden brown and the internal temperature checked around the fattest part of the breast should be around 155 degrees. We're gonna let it rest about 10 minutes. What this is gonna do is any residual heat is gonna carry over cooking. So it's gonna reach the temperature we want. Also, it's going to allow the time for the muscles to absorb more moisture. If we try to cut through it right now, it's hot and all the juices are going to flow out. So first to carve our chicken, we're gonna remove the drumsticks. We wanna find where the joint is. It's gonna be pretty close to the leg. I use my knife and you can see the skin breaks here. The leg is right here, the breast is over here. And right before it starts to turn into the thigh is where we're gonna cut. And that's our first drumstick. And we'll do the same thing on the other side. Now we wanna cut the thigh. So the thigh is right underneath the breast on the bottom and connects to the spine. So I'm gonna cut down right where this meat hits the spine right here. It looks so good, it looks so caramelized. And now the same thing on the other side, right where the wing meets the neck and the shoulder, we're gonna cut. And then the other side slides right off. So I'm using a nice eight inch chef's knife here. It's nice because it's big and it's gonna fit the size of the chicken. But also I wanna make sure I'm using a sharp knife. It might feel scarier to use a sharp knife, but it's much more safe than a dull knife because the dull knife is more likely to miss cutting through the food and slide around and create some danger. Whereas a sharp knife is going to glide right through. So there's two breasts along here. I'm just gonna cut right through them down the center to separate them. I'm gonna saw my way through and then we're gonna find eventually the breastbone, which is right behind them. So I'm sawing and I can cut pretty much through the bone. This breast here is attached to the backbone. I'm gonna cut the backbone off. This part, there's not much delicious meat on it, but it still has a lot of flavor. So we're gonna save it for stock. Now let's slice the breasts into smaller pieces. I'm just gonna cut this little breastbone off before I slice it. And again, this can also be saved for stock. I think carving a smaller chicken is much more difficult than carving a larger one. A larger one, you can get the drumstick and the thigh still intact. And it's just gonna be a little bit easier to work with in general. And then I see the breastbone on the other breast here. Get rid of this. We cut across the grain. You can see it's really nice and juicy. Looks really tender and delicious. Let's put everything together. There's really no rules. So I'm just gonna decorate the plate with some fresh thyme. Just tuck them right underneath so it looks very natural. Add some fresh lemon slices too. And that's how you make the perfect roast chicken. So hopefully this takes away some of the intimidation of getting a big bird. It's so easy to do and it can be part of your weekly rotation. I'm showing you one way to do it, but it's so versatile as far as what flavors you wanna use and you can use it for so many different other applications. Chicken is such a nice blank canvas. So really feel free to use your own personal thumbprint on it.