So lovely people, the lovely Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are getting married and as we all heard they got engaged over making a roast dinner, roast chicken, and it got me thinking about the ultimate roast chicken recipe. Everyone knows how to roast a chicken but I’ve got a method that takes it up to three notches. Are you interested? Let’s do this. royal style.
Let’s talk about shopping. Chicken. This is a hundred-day old chicken. It’ll easily serve six to eight people beautifully. Slightly smaller this is a Label Anglais.
It’s been corn fed a little bit, you can see the colour. We’ve got a little poussin here right, corn fed again. And then here we’ve got an organic chicken. Delicious.
So the one I’m going to do is a nice little Label Anglais.
First up finely chop some herbs. I’ve got some marjoram here, parsley, basil, seasoned with salt and pepper. Add a nice couple of lugs of olive oil. Mix it up. The oil will help bring out all the natural flavours and oils from the herbs, and then we’re gonna get our chicken.
If you can get a dry plucked chicken the skin is so crispy and it’s delicious.
What I want to do is just run my knife around the top of the legs and score that skin like that, and then just pop that little ball joint. Take the end of the chicken leg off and when it cooks and roasts it just looks beautiful. Put the chicken on its side and I want this thigh meat to cook at the same rate and speed as the breast meat, so I’m simply just gonna do three confident slices down to the bone and it also allows your flavoured oil to get in there. With the breast, right, I want you to be very, very careful.
Here is the end of the skin. I want you to pull it towards you so you don’t tear it and just get your finger in between the skin and the breast, make a little pouch and then I’ll use a little spatula to get right down there. Divide these herbs by half, and again, I don’t want to tear that chicken skin. Wonderful! Look at that!
Just get two slices of butter and I’ll ram these down the chicken breasts.
So that’s gonna make your chicken breast juicier than ever. It’s gonna make that skin crispier than ever. There’s one other trick that I’ve got. Lemon.
Now if I put a cold lemon in there, the hot air is not gonna get in and it’s not gonna be kind of cooking as even as I’d like it. So we’ve got a hot lemon that I’m gonna just stab and this is basically a boiling hot citrus time bomb.
Now we are gonna tie this bird up. Take a little bit of our butcher’s string, get it in half, but it just under the legs like this, take it up to these little notches here, and I’m gonna do a little knot. Tighten it up, go in between the breast and the legs, turn it over, you do another little knot, and it’s just gonna keep it in shape, and it means you get a nice, neat, even cook.
With all the kind of remnants of the oil and the herbs, you rub that all over the chicken and it’s really a spectacular thing. Into a tray we go, a whole bulb of garlic, two onions, cut those in half. I’m gonna cook it at 225 degrees celsius for one hour. It’s gonna be spectacular. Look, look, look at that!
You know it makes sense.
Ahh, so good. The string holds it all together, but you know that that chicken is done when you can pull the meat off the bone and when the juices run nice and brown. If you look in here you can just take skins off these bits of onion. You’re gonna have the best, best gravy.
I’ll put this heat on add just a heaped tablespoon of flour just mush it all up. You don’t even need stock, just top it up with some water bring that to the boil this, of course, is the time where you let the chicken rest, you finish your gravy and that’s when you bring your salads or your greens or your potatoes altogether.
So let’s sieve out all of those chunks. Mega flavour, take a little ladle and push it through. Look at that!
Bring it back up to the boil and you’re gonna have an amazing gravy. Let’s look at our lovely chicken, see how crispy that skin is how the herbs are trapped really, really nice. Let’s have a little carve-up. First up, run the knife around the back of the leg and just click it and it will just fall apart, cut it across like that giving you that beautiful drumstick and that wonderful thigh meat.
If there are any little juices that come out don’t be afraid just to pour those back into your gravy because it’s all flavour, juices galore.
When it comes of course to the breasts let’s just take a nice little chunk here. You can see the herbs underneath, you can see the gorgeous, crispy, golden skin. You can see that the breast meat is juicy, juicy, juicy. That’s what it’s about guys. The smell at this point from the lemon is phenomenal.
It’s fragranced the whole of this amazing chicken.
This lovely gravy over the top of the chicken like this, wonderful. That’s got to surely get the royal seal of approval. So that my friends are a classic roast chicken to savour and enjoy. The gravy is amazing, the skin is crispy, the herbs and that juicy, juicy meat.
Enjoy, happy roasting, take care…
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