Saturday night is roast chicken time, aka roast dinner for beginners

People with "real" jobs tend to do their socialising at weekends.  But neither I or my other half have real jobs; we find that we socialise more during the week, and that weekends have become our "wind-down" time, when we spend time at home catching up on chores, reading, browsing the Internet and cooking.  On Saturday, I buy food for the weekend and my shopping basket will nearly always contain a piece of meat for roasting.  The favourite - both with us and our cats - is chicken.  Because we're too impatient to wait until the more traditional Sunday lunchtime, we have our roast dinner on Saturday night, and then live off the chicken for the rest of the weekend and into Monday.

It's not hard to roast a chicken. And the incentive to learn is huge, because not only will you get a nice roast dinner out of it, you'll also be able to get at least one meal for two people out of the leftovers, if not two meals. Finally, when all the meat has been picked clean, the bones can be boiled up to make stock for use in sauces, stews and soups.

Roast chicken, roast potatoes, veggies and home made gravy

You will need (serves two):

• A whole chicken
• Half an ounce of butter for the chicken. Real butter, not margarine.
• Tablespoon of goose fat or beef dripping for the roast potatoes
• Generous pinch of salt
• Two large potatoes (or four smaller ones)
• Either one or two vegetables - say, broccoli. Tinned sweetcorn is great with roast chicken also
• Cornflour
• Little bit of Marmite or soy sauce

The order you do things in will depend on how much cooking time your chicken needs depending on its size. The potatoes will take about 1 & 3/4 hours from the peeling stage to taking them out of the oven with the chicken. So for a typical sized chicken, which takes about 1 hour 30 minutes to cook, it will be a case of:

• Switch oven on - gas mark 6 (200 deg. C)
• Wash/peel and chop potatoes into large chunks and boil them (cooking time: 15 minutes)
• While the potatoes are boiling, prepare the chicken (see below)
• Put chicken in oven
• Put the goose fat in an empty roasting tray and put that in the oven next to the chicken to melt the fat
• When the potatoes are done, drain them with a colander and allow them to dry for five minutes
• Take the roasting tray with the goose fat out of the oven, and place the potatoes in it. Spoon the melted goose fat over the potatoes so that they're covered in a thin layer of it. Sprinkle lightly with salt. You can also add a little fresh rosemary if wanted - it tastes great with the potatoes.
• Place the potatoes back in the oven alongside the chicken
• Prepare and cook the veg (see below)
• Take chicken out of oven, and use the juices to make gravy (again, see below)
• Carve the chicken
• Take potatoes out of oven
• Drain the vegetables
• Serve. Whew!

Preparing your chicken for roasting

Remove any packaging, and stick your hand inside to see whether there's a plastic bag of giblets in there. (These days there usually isn't - but it's always worth checking! If you hit the giblet jackpot, so to speak, you can always put them in with the bones when you make stock, so they won't go to waste.) Then wash the bird in a bowl of water, and pat dry with some kitchen paper or a clean tea towel (if you use the latter, it will need washing afterwards rather than being used to dry dishes.)

How long do I need to cook my chicken?

Before you throw the packaging away, use the weight printed on the label to work out the cooking time (if there isn't a weight given anywhere, then obviously you'll need to get the scales out!) If the weight is quoted in kilos, you need 45 minutes per kilo plus an extra 20 minutes. Thus a for a chicken weighing 1.75 kilos, for example, the cooking time is (45 x 1.75) + 20 minutes = 78.75 + 20 = 98.75 minutes, or one hour 40 minutes, give or take.

In Imperial units (pounds/ounces), that translates to 20 minutes per pound, plus that extra 20 minutes at the end. If the weight printed on your chicken's packaging is a decimal (e.g. "3.7 pounds"), you can use the same method for calculating the cooking time as you would for kilos, above. Thus the cooking time would be (20 x 3.7) + 20 = 74 + 20 = 94 minutes, or roughly 1 hour 35 minutes. However, if it's given as pounds and ounces (say, 4 pounds 5 ounces), you need to employ a bit of guesstimation. Or use the handy table shown above.

So a 4 pound 5 ounce chicken would need (4 x 20) + 8 + 20 minutes, or 108 minutes. Which translates to 1 hour 48 minutes.

Cooking the chicken

Place it on a roasting tray. A roasting tray is a metal tray with a metal stand that has holes in it, to allow the juices of your roast meat to drain into the main tray below. If you don't have a roasting tray, you can use a rectangular metal baking tray and place a wire cooling rack on top. Slather the skin of the chicken with the butter. Sprinkle a generous pinch of salt on your hand and work this into the chicken as well. This will make the skin nice and crispy during roasting.

When the chicken's cooked, you should be able to prick the skin between the legs and the body with a knife or skewer and see clear, almost colourless juices running out. If there's any red in the juice, the chicken's not done yet and will need a bit more time.

Preparing and cooking the veg

Start preparing the broccoli 20 minutes before the potatoes and chicken are due to come out of the oven. Wash it, chop off and discard the very end of the stalk and cut the rest of the broccoli into bite sized chunks. Don't let the stalk go to waste - you chop it into julienne strips and cook it with the florets. The broccoli will need simmering for five minutes in slightly salted water that has just come to the boil.

Gravy

Don't reach for the Bisto when making gravy - use the juices of the meat that collect in the roasting tray. Drain them into a small saucepan - use a sieve to catch any bits - and then use a spoon to cream off any fat from the top. Then thicken with cornflour paste. Place on the heat, with stirring. Keep stirring until the mixture starts to thicken. A bit of Marmite or soy sauce can be added to improve the flavour. Yum.

There you have it - what I hope is the definitive guide to cooking a roast chicken dinner! Check out my other cooking hubs for a stir fry recipe to use up the leftovers. You might also want to read the article which originally started as the "mother" hub to this one, but which I've now moved to my own blog - it's entitled Learn to cook : you know you want to, but where do you start?

© Empress Felicity October 2009