Roast Chicken Dinner

This is a great simple chicken recipe that has always worked for me. It's a great main dish for dinner for very little effort and only a little bit of time mostly in unattended cooking. It's based on a recipe I got from Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Italian Cooking that I've made my own over time. It doesn't need basting at all and a fresh organic chicken will assure that, other than the lemon to keep the roast moist and some seasoning with salt and pepper, there need be no other flavoring or enhancement to result in an amazing dish.

I can't stress enough that the quality of the chicken used for this recipe is critical to its overall success. If you use a factory-farmed poultry for this, or for any chicken recipe, you'll probably have to add a fair amount of enhancement and preparation time and effort to get anything close to as good as this will yield just with the very simple elements of chicken, lemon and seasonings. The extra cost for an organic chicken will more than pay for itself in quality of taste, nutrition and, as recent reports are indicating, healthiness.

 This is the roasting pan I use from Sur La Table.
17" x 12 1/2" x 3"

A less expensive generic roasting pan would work well also.
 17" x 11" x 2"

 I use a roasting rack to put the chicken on - this allows for the bird to sit above the drippings.

 Indispensable tools for any chef - a well sharpened chef's knife, a quickie sharpener and a honing steel.

A whole organic free-range chicken washed inside and out.

 The seasoned chicken with fork-pierced lemons for the cavity.

 The bird on the rack prior to cooking - here the back side is facing up.

The finished chicken showing the leg tie. The breast-side is facing up.

Tools:

roasting pan

roasting rack

a very sharp good chef's knife (*see my post about knives)

a cutting board on which you can carve the cooked chicken

an instant-read food thermometer (*cheap and well worth the cost) 

butcher twine

Ingredients:
one 3-4 pound whole free-range organic chicken
2 small lemons
fresh-cracked black pepper
Kosher salt

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350F.
Wash and dry the chicken thoroughly and remove any loose fat from the inside. (Be sure to clean your hands and any implements thoroughly that have come into contact with the uncooked chicken to avoid any potential salmonella issues.) Combine fresh cracked pepper and salt into about a 1/4 cup overall and with your hand spread liberally inside the chicken and outside on the skin. Perforate the lemons several times with the tines of a fork and put into the chicken cavity. Use 2 or 3 sturdy toothpicks to close up the cavity so that the lemons do not tumble out. To close, pierce each toothpick on one cavity flap and pull through to the opposite flap. Then tie the ends of the legs together with butcher twine.
Place the chicken back-side up on a rack in a roasting pan then put into the preheated oven to cook for 30 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven to flip the chicken to breast-side up for the remaining cooking time increasing the heat up to 400F. Cook until your food thermometer registers that the internal temperature is about 175F. The best way to determine this in a whole chicken is to put the thermometer into the thigh making sure not to have it touch any bones. For a whole chicken I find it takes about 18-20 min a pound to cook to the desired temperature.
Remove the roast from the oven, place onto a cutting board or platter and cover with foil and allow to rest for about 15 minutes. The rest is critical to cooking any kind of meat as once removed from the heat source, the tasty juices in the meat require time to recede back into it. If you don't let it rest, the meat will inevitably lose those juices, hence moisture, and much of the meat's flavor,


Optional step:
If you want to try it, you can use the pan's remaining juices from the roast to make a quick gravy if you like. I generally put the pan over two burners, adding some white wine, bringing it up to a boil and then using a wooden spoon to scrape the hardened drippings to incorporate into a sauce that I allow to cook to reduce to the consistency I like. Reduction is a technique of heating a liquid to the extent that much of the water content evaporates leaving the remainder which usually holds concentrated flavor - this is what they mean in a restaurant when they refer to a gravy or sauce as a 'reduction'.
If you have time to allow it to cool a little, spoon off any floating fat before using.

I've used this recipe in classes as an easy-to-prepare no-fail chicken dinner and people are amazed how good a meal this simple recipe will produce. Again the secret is getting a really good chicken to start with!

Knives

Something I notice that is true of almost all people new to cooking, and even of many experienced home chefs, is that they do not place much importance on the knives they use, how they use them, and, IMO most importantly, the care of them. Maintaining high quality knives that are well-cared for are one of the most important aspects of cooking. I can not overstate how critical it is that they be of good quality and that they are constantly kept as sharp as possible.

As a home chef of whatever experience, you should at least have one high quality chef's knife that you find comfortable in your hand, a paring knife, and a serrated (aka bread) knife.

L to R: paring, chef, serrated, honing steel

There are certainly a lot more kinds of knives that one would find helpful for cooking but these are the absolute minimum to have. It's a good idea that you get them periodically sharpened by a professional and get into the habit of honing them on a good steel every time you use them in order to maintain their precise cutting ability. Honing is not to be confused with sharpening as it primarily aligns the microscopic edges of the knife as they are misaligned during use but you will notice a real difference in a knife's effectiveness between doing and not doing so.

Why am I focusing on this so much? A well maintained knife will aid you in making very clean cuts which helps get the most out of the ingredients in your dishes. It will actually be much safer even if you suffer a mishap as a clean wound is much easier to repair and heals much better than a cut from a dull knife. It will also aid your knife technique immeasurably leading to more confidence in your abilities as your overall cooking skills increase.  And any good chef will pick out the amateur immediately based on how well or ill cared-for a cook's knives are.