Simple Roast Chicken

Roast chicken is one of those dishes that intimidates novice chefs but is actually easy to cook. Beyond a small list of ingredients, you just need basic kitchen tools like a chef’s knife, roasting pan and oven.

Though not mandatory, we recommend using an instant-read thermometer for more precise results. The last thing any cook wants is an undercooked chicken.

Buy a thermometer from Amazon for this and other recipes.

We missed certain food favorites while we lived as digital nomads – especially American hamburgers and Mexican tacos. However, we could always find ingredients to roast a chicken since people eat chicken pretty much everywhere in the world.

Having a decent kitchen with an oven was not always the case during those nomadic days. Since this is no longer an issue now that we have a permanent home base in Lisbon, we can cook whatever we want. Sometimes we want to roast a chicken.

When we’re not traveling, we like to roast a chicken every week or two. It’s an easy and cheap dinner option that fills our apartment with happy smells and our bellies with wholesome food.

If you’ve followed a recipe for roasted chicken before then you know that roasting a chicken makes the entire house smell good. For us, the aromas bring back childhood memories of our mothers roasting chickens for Friday night family dinners and holiday meals.

Since we’re just two people and can’t eat a whole roast chicken in one meal, we often enjoy leftovers the next day or repurpose the meat into a different dish.

One of our favorites is to shred the chicken and saute it with sliced red bell peppers and onions. We enjoy this dish in a Mexican-style dinner with fresh tortillas, avocados, cilantro, salsa and homemade Mexican crema.

Pro Tip
Freeze the chicken carcass for chicken stock if you have room in your freezer.

Beyond a whole chicken, our simple roasted chicken recipe includes items that you probably have in your fridge and pantry – rosemary, butter, garlic, black pepper and salt. You can also add root vegetables like potatoes and carrots to the roasting pan. Some chefs go even further.

Julia Child preferred to roast her chickens over a bed of onions. Thomas Keller‘s recipe for chicken uses a mix of root vegetables including turnips, rutabagas, carrot and onion.

At the bistro NoMad, world-class chef Daniel Humm served his birds stuffed with a melange of beautiful fresh flowery vegetation like lavender and sage. Humm’s recipe involves stuffing the skin with brioche and foie-gras but you certainly do not need to go that far and probably won’t.

Marcella Hazan stuffed her bird with lemons and the result is wonderful. As for us, we like to simply stuff our chicken with whole cloves of garlic and a variety of fresh herbs.

With some advance planning, roasting a chicken is easy to do. We like to buy whole chickens at our favorite local butcher since they source their birds locally. But you can buy a decent bird at any local market.

Most chickens in the United States are a little lighter than the kind we buy in Portugal. The hen in our photos was big – around 5+ pounds. Most American birds typically weigh about 3.5 – 4.5 pounds.

This chicken, a robust, slightly older bird, was a challenge to carve since it was difficult to separate the leg and thigh joints from the body. You generally won’t have that problem with an American chicken.

Our roast chicken recipe is easy. It requires a minimal amount of active cooking time and no special equipment.

And the best part? This recipe gets easier every time you make it. You’ll discover new ways to make a pan sauce. We like adding wine and butter to ours.

Hungry For More Chicken?