The Best Way To Make Chicken

A classic rotisserie chicken is my number one favorite food. Just think about it, on the outside you've got this crispy golden brown skin that's been seasoned to perfection, and then on the inside there's this beautiful juicy fall-off-the-bone meat. And when you top that all off with some melted herb butter, you've got one of the best tasting things on the planet. It starts off really simple with a seasoning blend that includes a bit of paprika, you can always try this with smoked paprika if you like that better, a bit of garlic powder, a nice pinch of dried thyme. It's always good to use dried herbs if you're going to be cooking for a long time, which with this chicken we are. Then a nice sprinkle of this chicken bouillon powder. What I love is that it really helps to boost that chicken flavor. Think of it like adding onion powder to onion. And finally just a bit of fresh cracked pepper and a nice generous handful of salt. Now we'll whisk up that seasoning blend to make sure everything is combined evenly, and you should be left with a blend that has this beautiful golden tan color. If you feel like adding or subtracting any of these seasonings to make the recipe a little bit better for you, you should do it. Now sometimes I like to put on a pair of gloves for this. It's just a little bit more comfortable this way. And the goal with our chicken will be to get crispy skin. So the first step here is to dry the chicken. I actually do my best to dry it inside and out, because the drier we can get it on the outside, the crispier the skin will become. As you dry, just move it all around and make sure you cover every single corner with those paper towels. All right, Mr. Chicken. Next, I'll go all over the chicken with some olive oil, first all across the top. And then before I rub it in, I'll flip him over and then do the same thing all across the bottom. We don't want too much oil, because otherwise all the spices are going to fall off. We want just enough that all the spices will stick. Just give your chicken a nice loving massage. The key is to hit every single part of the chicken skin with that oil, and then eventually every single part of the chicken with that seasoning blend that we just made. If you need to, you can pick the chicken up like this and spin it all around, kind of like a rotisserie, to make sure you've covered every spot. He's looking pretty good. Now, if you have gloves on, those gloves can come off. We don't actually want to rub the seasonings in. It's a mistake a lot of people make. Instead, from nice and high up, we want to season the bird all over, and that seasoning should fall down nice and even on the chicken. I even like to go from the side, just to make sure I'm getting all the spots. As you can see, when I season from high up, it's spreading super, super evenly. The way you can see that easiest is by actually looking at all the little green spots where the thyme is. It's almost perfectly even across the whole bird, but the key here is really get down, look at all the sides of your bird, and make sure that you have hit every spot with that seasoning, because if you put the proper care into seasoning it correctly, you're going to taste it at the end. Now, carefully, I will roll my bird over, and same thing, all across the back side of the bird. Nice, even spread of seasoning, covering every last spot of our chicken. Sometimes, I even find it helps to sit it up on one side with one hand, and then do a little bit of seasoning that way too. And now, just one more side, with the perfect amount of seasoning left. And now, once we feel like we have full coverage of seasoning on the entire chicken, it's ready to go into the fridge for 8 to 12 hours. And I know, it sounds like a really long time, and if you want to bake it right away, you can, but the meat won't be as juicy and tender, and the skin won't be as crispy and delicious as if you wait about 8 to 12 hours. Into the fridge we go. While our chicken is brining in the fridge, we can start prepping our vegetables, because it's nice to have vegetables sitting at the bottom of this beautiful drippy chicken. With the carrots, we're going to start by just simply peeling them. If you don't want to waste all the carrot peels, you can actually turn them into these really nice crispy carrot chips. Because I don't love carrots, I'm just going to do three of them. So now, what we're going to do is cut them just like this. It's called a roll cut, and it'll give us some different texture. And what I like is that some of these pieces will cook a little bit more than others, some of these pieces will cook a little bit less, and it'll make our final dish more exciting. Into our roasting pan they go. Now for our shallots. For these, we're actually going to keep them whole. So all I'm going to do is just peel off that outer layer of skin, and once we've peeled a few, we can toss them evenly around our roasting pan as well. And what these are going to do as they cook is get super soft and actually really sweet. Next, potatoes. Aside from rotisserie chicken, one of my other favorite things out there, these we're simply going to chop right in half. As far as what type of potato you use for this recipe, you can pretty much use whatever you want, just make sure you cut them all about the same size as some of your other vegetables. And once again, into our roasting pan we go. And now what I like to do is a quick little detail, is have some of the potatoes facing up and some of the potatoes facing down. And what that does, since they'll all cook differently, is give us this really nice balance that we're always looking for. And now the very last vegetable that I like to do with my roast chicken, leeks. These take a long time to cook, but once you do cook them, they're delicious. And the whole roast chicken is the perfect time to do it. With these leeks here, I've actually already trimmed and cleaned them. And if you look over here in my chicken stock, you can see I've already used all the leek tops for the stock, just makes it taste a bit better. But for the bottom part of the leek, which is what you can actually really eat, you really have to rinse them well between all those layers to get out the dirt. So I've done that ahead of time, and now I can just tuck these nice and even between all of my other vegetables. And now to finish off our vegetables, I'll add a small ladle of stock all across the veggies. That chicken broth is almost going to help to steam the chicken and make it extra juicy. A few even pinches of salt. And last but not least, a generous drizzle of olive oil all across the tops of our vegetables. Now let's just pretend we can fast forward to the rested chicken. This is actually the easiest part. All I do is I place this wire rack on top of my roasting tray filled with all the vegetables. And what will happen here is as our chicken cooks, it's going to have plenty of airflow all around it on the top, on the bottom, under that wire rack. And it's going to get cooked evenly and be nice and crispy all around. And then as those juices fall off the chicken, they'll fall right onto our vegetables. And not only will they cook them in this super flavorful juice, but we can also use it as a dipping sauce later. Into the oven, we'll bake our chicken for about three to three and a half hours depending on your oven. But about every 30 minutes or so, you'll want to drizzle a bit of oil over the skin just to give it that beautiful shiny rotisserie look. Once the deepest part of the chicken thigh comes to 160 Fahrenheit, it's done. We also have something we can do while we wait. I love to make an herb-filled butter that I serve with my rotisserie chicken. I think I make it different every time based on the ingredients that I have in my fridge at home. But for this one, we'll do a touch of orange zest. I love orange zest so much. Then we'll add in some nice fresh parsley and then a few sprigs of thyme. But you want to make sure to pull off those little leaves and remove these stems that are on the inside. And then a generous pinch of salt and some fresh cracked pepper. And before we add our butter, I'll pulse this up just to finely chop up all our herbs. Now for the butter, I'll add in two sticks of softened butter. And once again, pulse. You don't want to over mix the butter here because it's nice to have some of the bigger pieces of herbs there, but you'll probably have to scrape down the sides of the bowl just once. And then one last time, give it a quick pulse. Now the way we roll this up is simply by taking some plastic wrap, then working quickly. We don't want the butter to melt. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and place this into the center of your plastic wrap. And once we've got all our butter in there, we can fold this over and just do your best to try to shape it into sort of a square. And eventually, if you twist the sides tight enough until it sort of looks like candy in a wrapper, you should be able to find a nice surface somewhere in your kitchen where you can roll it back and forth until it shapes into a log. And this now can go to the fridge to firm up until our chicken is done. Now we wait. Watching your rotisserie chicken cook can be a little bit like watching water boil. The more you stare at it, the longer it seems to take, but in this case, I think our chicken's actually done. It can sometimes be tough to know exactly when to pull it from the oven. If it glistens in the sunlight just like this one here, it's probably done. It's a beautiful bird. Not only do I love the fact that the entire bird has become golden brown here, but I also love that I can look through the little cracks on the wire rack and see all those nice vegetables waiting underneath with all the juices that have dripped off the chicken. If you want to do this the right way, you should let it rest for about 10 minutes, just like a steak. You want to lock in all of those juices into the meat of the chicken. And if you cut it now, you'll lose a lot of that. We'll move that off to the side. All I need right now is my beautiful roast chicken. I want a bit more color on my potatoes here, so I'm going to face some up and I'm going to face some down on a separate little sheet tray here. And that way, I can broil them and get them a bit more crispy, just for some texture and even more flavor. But this is an optional step. You don't have to do this if you don't want. I'm just thinking of fun things as I go here, and I think this will give the final dish just that little extra bit of deliciousness. And into the oven at a broil this goes. Just keep a close eye on that because after doing all that hard work with the chicken, we don't want to just burn all of our potatoes and then have no potatoes. That would be really sad. Now, with that added step of the potatoes going into the broiler, our chicken's rested enough now that we can begin to carve it. If you like, you can just place this chicken in the center of a table and just have people take parts from all around the table. And that's one fun way to do it. But I actually like to go ahead... You hear that crispy skin? This is the amount of juice that you get when you make a rotisserie chicken at home. I'm just going to carve in here and slice off the leg, then I'll flip it around. Oh my god, it's so juicy. Slice off the other leg, then I can actually just break off the wings here. There's one wing, there's the other. And then when it comes to the breast, sometimes it's nice to have a couple slices, but for now I'm just going to take two nice big slices off the breast. If you're eating with a whole group, whoever gets this piece is lucky. Take off the other breast. Right on the top of the carcass here is the wishbone. We used to dry this piece by the windowsill, and then two of us would make a wish, pull, and whoever gets the longer piece, which in this case would be this one here, their wish supposedly comes true. Now once you've mostly cleaned off this chicken carcass here, you can actually add that right back to your stock, or you can save it to make another chicken stock later. And then to plate our chicken, layer it all around my plate here. Then I want to face some of those breast pieces up to be able to melt our nice butter all over those. And then potatoes. Ooh, listen to that crispy crackling. I'll plate a few of my nicer golden crispy potatoes, and then maybe some of the more plain ones just for color. And then a few of my really nice leeks, because those are just delicious once they've sat in all that nice chicken fat. A few of those carrots. But the thing I'm excited about above all else is actually the butter. All we need to do here is cut one or two nice rings right out of the center of our little butter roll. It should come off super easily like that. And then we can place a few of those rings over the top of our chicken. And to really make sure those are nice and melted, I'm going to go over all that butter carefully with a butane torch to really make sure that it's melted through. And you can see how right away we've got all these fresh herbs that have been melted over the top of our chicken. But I actually really want to try one of these fall apart legs. These are what usually have that perfect balance between fat and meat. But actually, if you take a little meat from everywhere and pair it all together in one bite with a little potato, a little carrot, and a little bit of our leek. Oh, a little more.