Pre-Culinary: Buttered Roasted Chicken

So in addition to seasoning your own butter, it’s kind of cool to be able to work with a meat from a more basic form than your skinless, boneless, seasoned chicken patty with the grill marks already on it. So this is a roasted chicken recipe with some nice picks of how to season a bird with your seasoned butter.

Buttered Roasted Chicken
Servings: ~ 4
Prep Time: ~30min
Cooking Time: ~1 hour and 20 - 40min

Ingredients:

For the Butter
• ½ stick of butter
• Lemon flavoring of some sort (zest from ½ a lemon, 1 ½ tsp lemon juice (fresh preferred but not necessary), or 2 tsp lemon pepper spice)
• ¼ cup of dried herbs of your choice (i.e. rosemary, basil, sage, marjoram; but you can really empty whatever is green and you think would go nicely with this recipe)
• 2 cloves garlic finely crushed (or pressed and finely chopped)
• Fresh black pepper to taste (omit if using lemon pepper)

For the Chicken
• 4-5lb whole chicken
• 2 tsp coriander
• Salt and pepper to taste

Directions :
Soften the butter (i.e. leave it at room temp until soft). Mix the butter with the lemon flavoring, dried herbs, garlic, and black pepper (for the butter) in a large bowl. Beat and mix the butter with the seasoning until it is fully mixed and there is an even distribution of the seasoning in the butter. Optional: you can make more of the seasoned butter, roll it into a log in saran wrap and put it in the fridge for later.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Take your chicken out of its covering, remove the inner gizzard like stuff, wash in cold water, and pat dry. Carefully and without tearing the skin separate the skin from the meat starting at the head and tail ends of the torso (see the picture below). Be invasive, invade the chickens personal space and try to separate the skin from the meat over as much of the bird as possible while still leaving the skin attached in certain areas like right down the middle of the torso (basically you want separation but to keep it covering the meat and to not remove it). Next use a bit more than ½ of the seasoned butter to season the chicken by rubbing and massaging it into the space between skin and meat (see the picture below). You can try putting some of the butter in the space and then from the external side of the skin, massaging the butter into the rest of the space you made under the skin. Rub the rest of the butter on the outside of the bird. Additionally season the outside of the bird with the salt, pepper, and coriander.

Put the seasoned bird in a roasting pan and roast for an hour and 20 min at 400 degrees F. The butter makes it so that you don’t need to baste (how great, you can now go and watch TV, check email, play with the kids, or go study). After an hour and 20 minutes, check to see if the chicken is done (i.e. does the juice run clear when you poke the thigh or the leg joint is loose when tugged). Let the chicken cool (while you bask in the joy of roasting a whole chicken and using your seasoned butter) for about 10 minutes, cutting before then would let the juices and flavor goodness evaporate out of the bird.

Comments
Now I don’t have a roasting pan. But, w/ a vision and some “whatever, this works” attitude, I made one out of a pyrex baking sheet and the grill plate from my toaster oven (see the picture below). If you also do this, you should flip the bird top to bottom in order to better cook the under side of the bird. You should also add 10-20 min to the cooking time of the bird. Also, I didn’t truss the bird because the heat can get around the legs and wings and make them. But I you have company and want to be fancier you can truss the bird, tuck the wings in and truss (trussing instructions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpSPfuJQVOA ).

Enjoy!

Picture 1: Seasoned Butter