Hello again! Here is another recipe that I will share, and I have to say, this is a friends and family favorite. They always ask me to cook this one whenever we are gathering for a special occasion, and that I am happy to make since it is quite easy to.
I assure you, once you make this, your friends and family will pay you a lot of compliments after!
Ready to cook? Here we go.
You will need:
1 whole chicken, the biggest you could find, washed properly, the inside and outside rubbed with salt until there is nothing slimy you see or feel, or anything gory for that matter :-)
1/2 lemon, halved (if you don't have lemons, 2 pcs kalamansi will do)
2 stalks of lemon grass
1 whole white/red onion, quartered
1-2 sprigs of rosemary, the leaves crushed and chopped finely (if you don't have rosemary, you can substitute parsley, the flat leaf or curly ones, any one will do)
salt and pepper
tablespoon of softened butter
around 2 tbsp olive oil
So, before you start cooking, here is the finished product to motivate you. It may not look very attractive, but I assure you, everyone licks them to the bone! Ha ha!
Here are the things that will make the chicken delicious. If you are roasting just 1 bird, you can use half a lemon only, and half an onion, and the rest you can use it for other things. I prefer rosemary to parsley, as rosemary is more aromatic.
And now that I have a rosemary plant and lemongrass at home, I won't have to buy them anymore as rosemary sprigs can be quite expensive! You can also use the dried kind, although you put less as the taste is already more concentrated being dried.
After cleaning your chicken thoroughly, pat it dry using kitchen towels. The next step would be to slather the whole bird with the softened butter. After that, you brush it with the oil, and again, you can use regular oil if you don't have olive oil at home. Make it your own, right?
After that, you sprinkle salt and pepper all over, making sure that it is evenly spread all over the bird so that the taste will be consistent. Do this for the inside part as well. Sprinkle the chopped herbs last. Also all over.
Now, if you want to do it the way my chef friend did it, he also put a few slices of bacon under the skin on the breast part. You just lift the skin up with your forefinger, careful not to tear it, that way, the chicken will taste even better! But you can forgo that if you don't want to break the bank.
After that, you start to fill the inside with the cut lemons, onions, the stalk of rosemary or parsley, whatever you are using. You put it there to remove any unwanted smell the chicken might have.
In the meantime, you can heat your oven to 200 degrees Celcius.
After doing all of the steps above, you then cover your bird with aluminum foil. Covering it will trap all the moisture and the cooking process will be even, making sure that your chicken will be cooked thoroughly and even.
Once done, put your chicken in the oven, at 200 degrees, just for 20 minutes. This high temperature is to 'shock' the chicken.
After 20 minutes, lower the temperature to 180 degrees for one hour.
After one hour, remove the aluminum foil. Your chicken should be cooked already, and the remaining time is just to make it golden brown. Notice that there is a lot of liquid accumulated after the process. You can pour this liquid into a small pot to make it into gravy. Put the chicken back in the oven and let it stay there until the surface of the chicken is golden brown.
I rushed this a bit, so it still looks a little bit sickly, since the people I was going to feed were already very hungry, ha ha ha. You can put yours in the oven a little bit longer to make it golden brown, the outside looking crispy, but the inside moist and tender.
Leave it for around 5 minutes to cool down before cutting and for the juices to settle down.
In the meantime, make your gravy. If you want to make more, add a cup of water into the accumulated juices, bring it to a boil, add a dash of soy sauce for a little more color. Adjust the taste with salt and pepper. If you think it tastes bland, you can try adding a quarter of a piece of chicken bouillon. Now to make your sauce thicken, dissolve about a tablespoonful of cornstarch in a little bit of water. Put that into the mixture and stir. Repeat until you have the consistency you want.
Cut the chicken the way you want to serve it. In Western families, they put the whole chicken in a platter and carve it on the dining table. They usually cut the breast part, and the legs and thighs. For us Filipinos, we cut it into pieces like this.
Enjoy eating!
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