How to make a really good roast chicken dinner

[Spinnymop]

I'm an ok cook when it comes to soups, pasta, stir fries, and curries but my roast dinners are quite bland and boring. If you make a really show stopping roast dinner, please share your secrets and save me from dry chicken and boiled vegetables.

If its dry it sounds like you are over cooking it?

I find the quality of the chicken makes a difference - I would expect to spend about £10 -12 on a chicken for a decent Sunday roast.

I put it in the roasting tin with a sprinkle of salt over the top, half a can of cider, same amount of water and a stock cube.

Cook for about 1 hr and a half if its a big chicken - pour the juices into a saucepan about 10 mins before the end and thicken with cornflour to make a gravy.

Serve with roast potatoes, homemade sage and onion stuffing, cauliflower cheese and honey roasted carrots. At this time of year I would also have a few sprouts as well.

To make sage and onion stuffing - chop and fry an onion, add some dried or chopped fresh sage and some dry chopped up bread (around 2 slices) add water or stock from the chicken until the bread dissolves into a paste. Cook in a shallow dish in the oven for around 25 mins - chuck a few spoons of stock from the chicken over the top about half way through.

You can buy cooking bags for chicken. Put it in one of those with a crumbled chicken oxo cube, some mixed herbs and some pepper. Keeps all the moisture in the chicken. Use the juices for your gravy.

Garlic and sea salt on your roast potatoes. Also roast the carrots rather than boiling them.
I rub butter into the chicken with garlic and sea salt before roasting. Use the juices for gravy, the butter makes the gravy delicious.

Dont over cook it is number one! The timings I was taught were 20 minutes plus 20 minutes per pound but I find with my fan oven I don't need that extra 20 minutes. Season and sprinkle herbs if you like.

For the veg I always roast carrots with my roast potatoes plus I often have roasted sweet potatoes, parsnips even beetroot and small ish whole onions roast well. I then serve with green beans which I steam or cabbage maybe then I serve either cauliflower cheese and/or red cabbage depending on how many are home and if I have a half portion frozen already. It's this mix of flavours that makes a ready a lovely meal

Buy the best quality chicken you can afford.

I always cook my roasts in with the chicken, they taste amazing cooked in the chicken juices.

My advice is to completely ignore the cooking times provided on the supermarket packaging for poultry. Bought a Lidl corn fed chicken last week. Advice was 30 minutes per 500g plus 30 minutes at 190.
I cooked it at 200 for 15 minutes per 500g plus 15 minutes and it was perfect. (Cooking instructions from my go-to Marguerite Patten 1960s cook book). Result perfect moist perfectly cooked chicken. Following the instructions would have massively overcooked it and made it dry and tasteless.

Get an organic chicken if you possibly can, at the very least go to a good butcher for your chicken.

I first cooked a roast chicken at the age of 41! I just followed advice from Jamie Oliver online and it worked perfectly.

For your roast potatoes you can’t go wrong following Delia Smith’s method - it always seems like she wants you to use too much oil but it works perfectly. Obviously keep children
and pets out of the kitchen when you have a roasting tin of boiling oil on your hob 😬

Generally speaking, the better the ingredients you use, the less you have to mess about with them and the better your flavours will be.

Half an hour breast side down then flip it over to finish it off.

Use the meat juices to make the gravy.

Make sure your potatoes are salted well and drained after oar boiling then roasted.

The secret to avoid dry roast chicken is regular basting. Say every 20 minutes at least. Take it out, tip the roasting tray, spoon the juices and fat over every part of the bird. Makes a huge difference. And are you resting it for 10 minutes before carving? Again, makes a huge difference.

Season the chicken well. Put an onion and a bayleaf inside it or a bunch of fresh thyme and some garlic. Salt and pepper on the outside.

I buy a decent chicken and slow roast it - google the bbc foolproof slow roast chicken recipe. It's delicious and includes the potatoes and jus as well, so easy.

There’s a bit of faffing around at the start to make the marinade (I’ve used dried oregano when I don’t have fresh and it works fine), but this is really tasty. I don’t bother with adding in lemon wedges, or the chickpeas, as I serve it with roast potatoes. The roasties in the second link can be boiled and prepped ahead so that helps make things easier too. I usually give them a little longer to get them super crispy as we like them that way.

Also, a free range or organic chicken will cook and taste better than a cheaper one.

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/roast-chicken-peppers-feta

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/smashed-roasted-new-potatoes

I bought a Ninja Health grill with a temperature probe which cooks chicken to just done. It is a revelation - the chicken tastes completely different and, as others have said above, makes me realise that by using the packaging instructions, I have been overcooking it for years!

I read on here to sprinkle a beef oxo cube over roast potatoes. It’s delicious.

Par boil potatoes for 10 minutes. Drain and fluff up the potatoes by transferring back and forth from the sieve to the saucepan a few times. Pour into a dish with super hot oil, coat thoroughly and sprinkle a couple of oxo cubes over.

Good quality chicken.
Coat it in butter with salt and herbs as a PP said.
Roast for 20mins with oven on high 220c
Then 30-45 mins with oven on 180 (depending on size)
then rest it for 20 mins or so before you carve it
(this is a brief summary of HFW’s method, which has never let me down)

Buy a meat thermometer - it makes such a difference for all meats. Use the cooking times as a suggestion, but check with the thermometer earlier than expected.

I cook chicken on a trivet of onion, carrot, celery and garlic. I take the chicken out when the thermometer shows just under, rest it for about 30-40 mins upside down on a preheated metal plate, covered in foil and a couple of tea towels. The meat is always perfect and juicy and it stays hot whilst you are cooking the veg.

I always put garlic and onion or lemon inside the chicken. Butter or olive oil and seasoning on top, and regular basting

https://www.countrylife.co.uk/food-drink/recipes/greatest-recipes-ever-simon-hopkinsons-roast-chicken-21456

God, my mouth is watering just reading all these recipes! 🤤

Shove half a lemon and some herbs up it's bum. Put an absolute crapload of butter on it before you start cooking it, and baste at intervals.

Roast potatoes - parboil for 10 mins, drain and give them a shake, sprinkle on a teeny bit of flour or semolina, put them into really hot fat in their roasting pan and make sure they get coated in it, top of a hot oven, turn them over occasionally. Towards the end of the cooking time, throw some whole cloves of garlic, some woody herbs (e.g rosemary, thyme) and maybe a bit of orange peel, just to add a bit of extra flavour.

Veg - lean into cooking things in the oven. A couple of ideas: roughly chop up an onion, a red pepper, a couple of cloves of garlic and a few tomatoes, throw them in an oven dish with a little olive oil, a good pinch of salt, a small pinch of sugar, and a scant teaspoon of wine vinegar or cider vinegar. Chuck in some herbs (eg a sprig of thyme). Shove it in the oven and give it an occasional stir. Or, braise veg in the oven in stock e.g. chop carrots and celery into batons, put in an oven dish with vegetable stock to cover, again lob in some herbs, foil over the top, bung it in the oven.

Basically, herbs.

Buy a meat thermometer and only buy higher welfare chicken.

I do my chicken upside down in the airfryer (with olive oil, sea salt, butter, garlic powder, pepper, and stuffed with chopped onions) for 45 mins, then final 10 mins flipped the right way round. Baste half way through. Moist chicken.

Roast tatties - boil 18 minutes, drain, return to pan and heat-dry and fluff. Tray of olive oil, butter, garlic and seat salt - I heat the oven to 220, get the oil spitting hot, tip in tatties, coat, roast for 20 mins or so, turn and bastethen eyeball the remaining time until they are golden and crispy. They're fluffy on the inside, and super crunchy on the outside, so good.

Veggies are steamed though roasting is tastier.

Homemade yorkshires (bbc recipe).

I should add I used to par boil my potatoes for the online recipes recommended times (usually 8-10mins) but found they were never turning out fluffy enough to be crispy. Doing it for far longer, just as they're about to fall apart, made them mega fluffy so when they were roasted in a very hot oven they went sooooo crispy and golden every single times. I never par boil under 15 mins now.

I just buy a normal chicken from Aldi, spray it with fry light, alittle salt and pepper and cover with foil then roast in the oven at 180 for an hour and 20 taking the foil off in the last 20 mins. It always comes out perfect, not dry at all with loads of juice to use for the gravy.