Lemon Roast Chicken

Ah, the roast.

It's one of those dishes that a lot of us grow up with, and then tend to end up taking for granted and ignoring once we start cooking for ourselves. Which is kinda dumb, as roasting a piece of meat - be it bird, beef or whatever - introduces a whole mess of flavours you otherwise can't replicate, as well as whole lot of cooking methods to explore.

And when it comes to roasting a lovely free-range organic chook, the thing that's really going to set the stage for the food itself is the choice of stuffing. Always important in terms of flavour, it's also very important in the technical sense. A good stuffing both stops the bird from drying out during the cooking process, and shapes it as well, making for much easier serving and slicing.

Plus, if you're a highline glutton like me... it tastes really, really good.

Lemon Roast Chicken

This is essentially Stephanie Alexander's excellent roast chicken recipe, though some small changes of my own have crept into it over the years. And I'm also a much lazier cook than her, so essentially cheat on some of the steps.

But it's still tasty!

ingredients

One realistically scaled organic chicken (so much smaller and tastier than the hormone monsters you normally get in supermarkets)

One lemon

Kalamata olives

Goose fat

Salt & pepper

See? It's such a simple recipe you don't even need to see a photograph! Also, this was meant to be a meal that my partner was cooking, since I was stupidly tired, but I did my usual trick of performing a drive-by take-over of the kitchen, and we worked on this together.

So once your partner realises what's happened and goes off to play World of Warcraft in between chopping vegies and brushing stuff with tasty, tasty fat, you need to stuff the bird. This sounds rude, and feels even ruder - you are essentially shoving stuff in the hollowed out bottom of a dead animal. But it's for a noble purpose.

In this case, we're using a lemon, cut into quarters. Take one quarter and rub the bird down vigourously with the fleshy side, then get stuffing. You want to place the quarters so that the rind is innermost to the body cavity - this insures that the juice of the lemon will cook through the chicken as it roasts. Add the olives as well, sliced up roughly. This adds a wonderful savouriness to the chicken, and let me tell you - they also taste great as you graze over the carcass after the meal!

Then, all you need to do is taking a basting brush, and brush the bird with the goose fat. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and you're ready to roast! This is where I get lazy; if you're really serious about roasting, you should turn the bird once every ten to fifteen minutes from side to side, top to bottom, so that it ends right way up for the final bit of cooking. I just left it on the roasting tray.

You can also add whatever veg options you want. In our case, we chopped up some kipfler and congo potatoes, added a couple of small onions, and sliced the top off a head of garlic, and surrounded the bird with it all. All the veg also got a liberal splash of fat. Finally, while the bird cooled, we steamed some broccoli.

So, after about 50 minutes of cooking you should end up with this:

Which when carved and plated should end up like this (and also end up with your mouth watering):

The real beauty of this method is that you don't need to baste the bird during cooking at all, making it a really easy dish to make even after getting home from work. The chicken's flesh is tender and lemon flavoured, with just a hint of saltiness from the olives. The skin is also just about perfect - the goose fat (trust me, a whole entry is coming on goose fat soon!) crisps the skin beautifully, and the lemon rub goes even further toward making the skin the most indulgent part of the meal.

Except maybe for those olives... *drools*