Confession: I have never roasted a chicken.
I understand that absolutely everyone everywhere has roasted a chicken but I am a complete rookie. I don’t really understand how it works. Pretty much whenever I cook meat I make sure it has the texture of Clark’s boot leather in case I poison someone. This includes meats that are meant to be pink such as lamb and beef. If I see the slightest rosy tint they go back in the oven for another half hour. It’s dreadful I know but I’d rather chew roast beef for forty minutes than get botchulism. I don’t help myself by reading Daily Mail articles about men who ate a steak and very quickly became paralysed until their hearts stopped. So roasting a chicken - a meat that can absolutely
not be pink - terrifies me. But tonight I overcame this hurdle by, you know… putting a chicken in the oven…
I am a little bit obsessed with Waitrose rotisserie chickens. Especially the rosemary and thyme ones. They stopped doing them in the Ealing Waitrose for a while and when I asked why the answer was “health and safety reasons”. I have absolutely no idea what this means but no matter: they’re back now. So when planning my first roast chicken this was obviously something that I had to try.
Grub (who I realise I’ve cooked for quite a bit recently – I think I’m starting to know his kitchen better than my own) summoned me round on Saturday evening to celebrate his lady’s football team’s 9 - 2 win. We made a deal that he would buy the ingredients and I would cook us dinner. After texting him a shopping list that included ‘a free-range happy chicken that never even LOOKED at a shed’ he panicked and bought two. One was a standard Waitrose chicken and the other a Tesco’s free range chicken.
Having spent an awful lot of time recently reading the
Channel Four Food website I’ve gathered that even a standard chicken in Waitrose has had at least a vaguely good life; once in a while seeing the sun and pecking at the odd worm. I’m sort of (read: not brilliantly) boycotting Tesco as they refuse to get rid of their standard, awful, battery-farmed chicken rubbish because lots of horrible people like them.
My mum is basically a pescetarian (having started eating fish when she was pregnant with me) who stopped eating meat because she found it cruel. To her that’s just a personal choice but she doesn’t have a problem with anyone else eating it. She’s always cooked meat for me and does a fantastic roast. But I’ve been brought up always eating organic and free-range meat. She thinks – and I strongly agree – that if you are going to eat an animal it should have had a good life before it goes to slaughter. And I honestly think that free-range meat tastes a lot nicer than an animal that has been cooped up for the whole of its life.
I think the big argument against free-range food is the price and that’s fair enough (I’d hate to meet to sort of person who would eat battery hens if they all cost the same) but when you eat factory farmed chicken for instance, what are you letting yourself in for? How good can a bird that has been reared in a shed packed to the rafters, some of them dead, fed until it could burst and rarely being given darkness in which to sleep, be for you? In my mind it can’t be healthy. I would rather eat a meat once week than twice and pay the same amount for it and know that I wasn’t putting money towards giving something a terrible quality of life as well as putting lower quality food on my plate.
I don’t want to sound like some middle class hippy – as I’m really, really not – but I think things taste better when you know that the meat you’re eating has had a good life or that the vegetables you’re munching on haven’t been sprayed in a load of chemicals. Maybe it’s just me but I would never buy battery chicken or eggs (or anything but
British pork) because I believe it’s not worth how ever much money you save – in all honesty I think that if you really look at what you’re eating you’re not saving anything at all.
But ANYWAY: roast chicken.
The packaging on your
obviously free-range chicken will tell you how long it should be cooked or the butcher will give you an idea. I always thought you could just stick chicken in the oven but I’ve found this isn’t the case. You should rinse your chicken out. Please don’t take this as kosher but I basically stuck mine under the tap and filled the cavity up with warm water. Then, while shuddering massively, I stuck my fingers in and did disgusting things for a bit. Some red bits came out with the water – I didn’t look too closely – and I did this a couple of times.
I stuck the (Waitrose) chicken on a roasting tray - I’d heated the oven to around 200°c - and stuck half a lemon up its bum (just to keep it moist – promise.) and some rosemary and thyme stalks. I chopped up a few handfuls of both these herbs and then attempted to get my hands under the skin. You have to be a bit rough to do this but gentle enough not to rip the skin. Stuff the chopped herbs between this and the breasts and try and even them out. Rub a tiny bit of olive oil over the chicken with a bit of salt to crisp the skin up and sprinkle over the rest of your chopped herbs.
Roast this in the middle of the oven for as long as you’ve been told to and you should end up with a lovely succulent, flavoured chicken. And the moral high ground.