How to roast a chicken * a new way to peel garlic easily * how to use a meat thermometer

Roast chicken

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to roast a whole chicken. If you know how to roast a chicken, you can save a lot of money and expand your choices when it comes to food. And it’s really easy, so let’s go.

First, you need a whole chicken. Don’t buy a roasting chicken. Roasters are huge and are actually best cooked by boiling, and who has a pot that big? Buy a smaller chicken, usually advertised as a fryer or just as a young chicken. You don’t want one more than about five pounds in weight, and preferably closer to four pounds.

The chicken is probably not frozen. If it is, stick it in the fridge for a day or two. But typically fryer chickens aren’t frozen. It’ll be in a heavy plastic bag. Sit this in the sink, round side down and the feet side up. Yes, I know you can’t see the chicken at this point and it doesn’t have feet anymore anyway, but you can feel the ends of the drumsticks and you want those pointing up. Cut the bag open at this end and pull it down around the chicken like a skirt.

Oh, and this is a good time to get out a pan with sides and preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. If you haven’t already done this, do it now, hopefully before your hands get covered with chicken grease. I usually use a plain 9x13 Pyrex pan, sometimes a metal pan that I line with one layer of tinfoil to help keep the mess down. Pyrex dishes are easier to clean than metal so I don’t use tinfoil in the Pyrex dish.

Usually the chicken will have giblets in a little bag stuffed into the cavity. Sometimes the chicken has loose giblets stuck in the cavity and probably surrounded by chicken-juice ice. Giblets are the edible organs, and even if you plan to cook them you need to take them out before you roast the chicken. If it’s a bag, that’s easy. If they’re loose, you’re going to need to pick the chicken up and shake it violently feet-side down over the sink. Hopefully the giblets drop out and you’re not too traumatized, because the wings and legs flop around and water droplets fly and it’s basically just like something out of a cut-rate horror movie.

If you can’t shake the loose giblets out, they’re frozen in place and you’re going to have to get in there with your hand. The main problem with this is that your fingers are going to immediately get so cold that you can’t tell what you’re doing, and trying to pick squidgy bits of chicken guts out of a matrix of ice with frozen fingertips is really the least fun part of roasting a chicken. I guess you could use a spoon.

If you’re still with me and haven’t given up on this episode yet, let’s fast forward to the point where you’ve removed those giblets. Usually it’s really not difficult. I almost always shop by price, so sometimes I luck out and the cheap chicken I bought is cheap because the giblets got left out so the chicken weighed less. That’s great, because in my house, the giblets go in the trash.

So you’ve emptied the chicken. You can rinse it if you want, but it’s really not necessary unless the skin doesn’t look clean. I mean, it’s going to look like dead chicken skin, but you don’t want to see any flecks of actual dirt. Also, if you dropped it in the sink at any point you should rinse it.

Plop your chicken on its back in the pan. Sprinkle it liberally with salt and pepper. You can add rosemary or other herbs too, but if you’ve never roasted a chicken before, just go the simple route. Salt and pepper, that’s it. However, if you’re a garlic lover, or even a garlic liker, and you have some garlic cloves on hand, get them out along with a knife with a broad blade.

You only need to peel this garlic, not cut it up, and after the lime crema episode my cousin Molly showed me the easiest wa