It’s been years since I have bought boneless chicken breasts but I remember how much of a challenge it was to keep them from getting dry. A whole section of marinades in every grocery store backs me up on this. I haven’t stopped eating chicken of course. I’ve just found that roasting a whole chicken is easy, gives me more (and better) meat and allows me to make stock for other dishes. Plus it is cheaper than the pre-packaged chicken.
I keep it really simple. I remove the giblets, rinse the chicken inside and out with cold water. Then I pat it dry and liberally add salt, pepper and usually some dry thyme to the inside and outside of the chicken. I’ve been trussing the chicken lately. Not the fancy way, I just tie the legs together but it’s not crucial. Then I put it breast side up in my roasting pan and pop it in the oven. The only high-maintenance thing I do is cook the chicken at 450 degrees for the first 15 minutes and then at 375 degrees for the rest of the cooking time. Many cooks cover the chicken in butter or oil. I don’t find this necessary. The hot oven sears the meat which keeps the moisture in and the skin ends up brown and crispy. Twenty minutes per pound or until juices run clear is the rule and it works fine if you don’t have a meat thermometer.
You can flavor the chicken with any number of things – stuffing it with halved lemons and cloves of garlic, using a spice rub of some kind or filling it with sprigs of rosemary. I rarely use anything other than salt, pepper and thyme because I usually use the chicken for more than one dish and this gives the chicken a little flavor without committing it to anything really strong that would overpower.
Once it is fully cooked, I let it rest for at least a half hour so it’s cool enough to handle and to let the juices settle. I pull off the skin and tear off as much good meat as I can. I don’t have any special tips for this. It’s a sloppy but satisfying job and the cook’s privilege is a few samples. I sometimes sort the light and dark meat depending on what I’m going to do with it but usually just throw all the meat in a bowl and all of the skin and bones into a separate bowl to use for stock.
I put the skin and bones into a stock pot and fill it with enough water to just cover them, usually 6-8 cups. I pour and scrape the drippings from the pan into a clear measuring cup and remove the fat from the top once it settles. I add the de-fatted drippings to the stock pot along with some roughly chopped celery and sometimes an onion and a carrot or two if I have them on hand. The stock is fine without these but the celery in particular adds a nice flavor. This simmers for a couple of hours then I let it cool a little, strain it through a colander and pour the stock into freezer bags.
Now that I’m writing about this, it sounds like more trouble than it is. The cooking and cooling time is long but the actual working time is nothing. It takes me 10 minutes to get the chicken in the oven and probably 15 minutes to remove the meat and get the stock in the pot. I get a couple of pounds of meat and two quarts of stock out of an average four pound chicken.
Beyond the taste and economic benefits, I have found that I’m much more conscious of the meat I eat since I started buying whole chickens. Holding the chicken under a faucet and drying it off you are much more aware that this was a bird that was recently running around (hopefully). Many of us non-farm folks are squeamish about it and maybe we should be. The appreciation of the chicken as a being rather than a product is the main reason I started making my own stock. It seemed like a waste not to use as much of it as I could. I started caring about how the chicken lived and what it was fed too, seeking sources of truly free-range, organic birds. I’m not a fundamentalist about this. I’d still rather see people buying boneless chicken breast strips and cooking for themselves as opposed to chicken in a microwave dinner. But if you get a chance, try roasting a whole chicken for yourself.