Not Just a Man's World

On a weight loss diet we eat a lot of chicken.  Its leanness and high protein content is really beneficial.

Recently I’ve been spending a half day at the weekend roasting 6 chickens and picking them apart ready for the lunches and dinners for the week ahead (it just takes too long to do during the week).  The problem is that after several weeks of plain roast chicken, dressed up with lettuce, a bit of veg and gravy, or (as a weekly treat) made into a curry, can get a bit dull.

Thanks to a comment from someone at work about how they baste their chickens by putting the butter under the skin, I was inspired to develop this spiced roast chicken.  There’s another flavour in the development phase too, but I’m still perfecting it so watch this space.

Spiced roast chicken

Ingredients (for a 1.5kg chicken):
1.5kg chicken
5 cloves of garlic (half of a small bulb), crushed
1 tsp cumin
½  tsp cayenne (chilli) pepper
1 tsp lemon rind
2 tsp butter
1 tbsp butter for basting

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 180C.
2. Place the chicken in the centre of an oven tray (you may want to line this with foil first).
3. Remove any giblets and other innards that may have been left in the cavity and rinse out the cavity with cold water (most store-bought chickens will come ready cleaned and this step won’t be necessary).
4. Starting at the opening to the belly cavity, lift the skin gently away from the breast bone.  You will find that two pockets are easily created over the breast meat but that the skin is connected to the breast bone down the centre of the chicken.  Once you can get the tip of a sharp knife into the space under the skin carefully slice through this membrane until you are left with a single big pocket under the skin along the whole of the chicken breast.
5. Mix all the other ingredients together (except the basting butter) thoroughly.  I find this is easiest to do with a pestle and mortar. 
6. Rub this spice mix into the breast meat underneath the skin, making sure that it is spread as evenly as possible.
7. Press the skin back in place (ensuring no air is caught under the skin) and tuck the opening over towards the cavity entrance.
8. Melt the basting butter in a pan over a low heat and brush it liberally over the chicken using a pastry brush.
9. Place the chicken in the centre of the oven for 1 ½ – 1 ¾ hours, rebasting the chicken with the fluids in the pan halfway through the cooking time and turning the temperature up to 245C for the last 15 minutes of cooking to ensure that the skin becomes golden and crispy.

A note on cooking time:

Many people will think that this cooking time is overdoing it.  However I’ve found that cooking it for this long means that the meat falls off the bone which makes my life much easier for picking apart joints and for carving (given my appalling carving skills).

If you are cooking a chicken that isn’t 1.5kg then I recommend calculatiing the cooking time on the basis of 20 minutes per pound (450g) plus an extra 20 minutes over this total time.

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: roast duck with apple
2. Paleo recipes: roast pork with crackling
3. Paleo recipes: chicken stir-fry
4. Paleo recipes: spicy tomato marinade