Cooking a chicken roast

While it is easy to buy a store bought ready made chicken, and we can’t argue that it is particularly cost effective at times, tit is simple to cook your own too.

With the big supermarket chains making roast chickens so affordable there has been a decline in the homemade roast chicken. However, the decline is not only attributed to the affordability but the perception of the effort to roast your own chicken. Cooking your own chicken from scratch will cost approximately $12-20/roast (depending on brand and size)

Roasting your own chicken is quite a simple process. A good roast chicken should have a crisp, juicy skin with succulent juicy meat. Be mindful of overcooking a chicken roast as there is nothing worse than an over cooked chicken where the meat is dry.

There are many flavoured options to cooking a roast chicken.  1 chicken will take approximately 15 minutes to prepare and 1 ½ hours to be thoroughly cooked depending on the size of the chicken.

• 100gm butter
• ¼ cup oil
• 1 tbsp salt
• 1 tsp paprika
• 1 lemon
• 500ml water

All of your hard vegetables- carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, etc are to be put in the liquid with the roast.

1. Smear butter, oil, salt & paprika on the chicken.
2. Cut the lemon into quarters and stuff into the middle of the chicken.
3. Put ½ litre of water in the bottom of the tray with the chicken in the liquid.
4. Cook in a moderate oven for 1 ¼ hours.

Prefer a Garlic roast:

Exactly the same as above but with smeared garlic (250 gm) on the outside of the chicken, stuffed in the chicken with the lemon.

Alternative:

Exactly the same as garlic but in place of lemon use orange and 1 whole banana stuffed in chicken and add cumin with the paprika

Note: Always allow all roasts to sit for 20 minutes before carving.

To avoid that overcooked and dry chicken a guide is a 1 ½ kg whole stuffed chicken takes about 30 minutes per 500 gm of weight to cook in an oven preheated to 180°C.