Pardon the very clinical photos of raw chicken - but hey! That's cooking - we figure you know by now. Roast chicken is an easy way to make a really good meal in almost no time. It was our introduction to proper cooking, frankly, and while we still haven't figured out which giblet is which, we still like manhandling a chicken carcass every couple of weekends. We usually go the utterly sublime, juicy and tender Zuni-style pre-salted route but last weekend we were craving lemon chicken...
We were cooking for a crowd and there was a slight disagreement between us and a fellow cook on the best way to get a really lemony chicken.
We felt that stuffing its hollow middle with lots of fresh lemon wedges would be the most direct approach; our fellow cook preferred draping the outside with thin slices but did admit that they'd never tried it before. We felt this would interfere with proper browning.
Since we were roasting two chickens we decided to try both methods.
The verdict? Both turned out splendidly lemony and fragrant with our current favorite fruit. The lemons on top of the outside-lemon variety did get a little browned and bitter but we still liked picking them off and eating them separately.
What about you - when you make a lemon chicken, what's your method?
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Last night I marinated a whole chicken in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and rosemary for about 6 hours and then roasted her over fingerling potatoes, sliced carrots and red onion wedges.
I think the trick is to brown the bird in olive oil/butter mixture on all sides before roasting.
Last night I roasted a small chicken with two whole lemons inside, and salt and pepper outside - Marcella Hazan's recipe. It came out great, and was so easy... although the meat wasn't extremely lemony, the juices were great spooned over it, and the sauteed rainbow chard I did on the side.
For me, the key is to use as many variations of lemon as possible.
Marinate the chicken with lemon, stuff the chicken with lemon and lemon thyme, rub the chicken with roasted garlic and preserved lemon and then deglaze the pan with lemon juice and finish with lemon zest and lemon thyme.
In the recent COOKS ILLUSTRATED here is a recipe for a crispy-skinned roast chicken. It involved carefullly separating the skin from the bird but leaving it intact. I wonder if you could make a briny paste of salt, olive oil, lemon zest, and lemon juice and inject into the space between bird and skin. And then continue to baste with this mixture as the bird roasts.
Unless I'm making cakes or pies, I rarely find the results from the multiple extra steps in Cooks Illustrated recipes to be worth the additional time and effort.
I slip lemon slices in between the flesh and skin. You can have your brown and crispy skin and lemony chicken breast too!
I grate the zest; mix it with garlic, herbs, and butter; then rub half of it on the breast under the skin and half over the rest of the chicken. The remainder of the lemon goes inside the cavity.
My method, which I think you'll all like very much, is as follows:
Cut the tips off the lemon, enough to expose the pulp. Then
use a mandoline, and make paper thin slices of lemon. Pepper them, and pan fry them in butter until they are kinda crispy. Salt the slices, and tuck a bunch of these fried peppered lemon slices under the skin of the chicken, along with your favorite poultry herbs, such as fresh thyme and sage. Pat the chicken skin dry. If you want extra crispy skin, put the chicken on a v-shaped roasting rack, and use a hair dryer to dry the skin; the drier the skin before roasting, the more crispy the skin will be. Brush on a very thin coat of oil. Roast, and enjoy.
I like to make lemon pepper chicken using rock cornish game hens by snipping out the back bone using poultry shears, removing the keel bone, and flattening the game hen, and blasting the game hens at 450Ëš for 15-20 minutes.
I like to poke holes in a room-temperature lemon and put it inside the chicken, and then sew up the chicken around it with springs of rosemary (you can sharpen the rosemary stick by paring it to a point with a knife). That way the chicken stays juicy.
I use the Cook's Illustrated method of separating the skin and pre-salting, then refrigerating uncovered for up to 24 hours (makes for some nice crispy skin!). But I use two lemons: One gets sliced almost in half, then inserted into the cavity. The other lemon is sliced in half, and the juice squeezed out over the skin on both sides (pre-salt). Then comes salt and pepper. Just prior to going into the oven, I take a stick of butter, slice it up, and stick several slices under the breast skin and the rest on top of the chicken. It works great--I get the lemony flavor, crisp skin, and moist meat every time! (Oh, as to heat: preheat the oven to 450, then reduce to 350 when you put the bird in.)
My go-to method: Cut a lemon in half, rub one half over the skin
then throw both halves in the bird with fresh thyme. Oil up the skin with a dab of olive oil and sprinkle with pepper. Throw in the oven on 400 degrees for an hour or less, until crispy skinned and brown on the outside, tender and very juicy on the inside. Really. And so yummy!