How to Cook a Roast Chicken in One Hour - The Gloss Magazine

How to Cook a Roast Chicken in One Hour

I adore weekend cooking. The weekends generally afford me more time to spend leafing through recipe books, jotting down prospective menus and compiling lists of necessary ingredients for a weekend worthy feast. To be honest, I am often guilty of this habit midweek too, but at the weekend, it is much more of an indulgence. It’s the time I set aside for myself to try new recipes or cooking techniques, but it is also the time to while away the hours preparing those time consuming meals that midweek rarely allows. One of these meals is habitually a weekend roast, everyone’s favourite Sunday meal. Beef and pork feature regularly but chicken is the one that makes an appearance most often for so many reasons. A plump free range chicken has so much to offer. Of course there is the actual meal that you create with it, but then there are the sandwiches that evening, the broth that forms the base of an exquisite Vietnamese noodle soup the following day and once the chicken has nothing left to offer (in my house anyway), the dog feasts like a queen on discarded chicken scraps. Ah yes, a roasted chicken is indeed a thing of beauty.

But – and here is the exception, there are some weekends when I want to do absolutely nothing. When I’m too lazy to attempt anything more than a meal that requires the bare minimum. A weekend when sinking into the couch with old movies and a fire crackling in the hearth is all I really want to do. On these occasions, I still want to eat well, I just don’t want to spend all day preparing it. I’m very much a creature of habit and despite my occasional weekend laziness, the meal must somehow represent weekend cooking without the associated labour intensive tasks that are usually involved. Enter, the One Hour Roast Chicken featured in And For Mains by Gaz Smith (of Michael’s Restaurant fame) and Rick Higgins (of Higgins Butchers fame).

The book itself is crammed full of drool worthy recipes that would instantly inspire you to don your apron and run straight to the kitchen, but it was the One Hour Roast Chicken that stopped me in my tracks. True, there are hundreds (thousands even) of excellent roast chicken recipes out there, all of which are mouth wateringly good but most of them do require a certain amount of advanced preparation and, let’s face it, work. I can’t get enough of the Zuni Café roast chicken recipe and Samin Nosrat’s buttermilk roast chicken is the stuff of dreams, but sometimes, less is more.

Last weekend, in one of my less productive moods, I experimented with the One Hour Roast Chicken recipe, and I can categorically confirm that it’s as quick (and delicious) as the recipe states. As long as you have a chicken, that is.

One Hour Roast Chicken
Serves 4

6 medium Rooster potatoes, peeled and halved lengthways
4 medium carrots, peeled, topped and tailed, and cut lengthways
2 medium brown onions, quartered
¼ turnip (roughly 200g), peeled and cut into 12 pieces
8 garlic cloves, unpeeled and left whole
6–7 sprigs of fresh thyme
125ml vegetable oil
1 x 1.5–1.7kg whole chicken
Fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

To serve
Chicken wing gravy (recipe below)

Preheat the oven to 200°C.

Place all the veg, garlic and thyme sprigs in the base of a large baking tray with a small lip (you don’t want a high-sided roasting tin because the chicken will steam in it and we want it to crisp up). Put the veg that you want to get a bit crisp (like the potatoes) around the edges of the tray and the veg that you want to soak up the chicken juices in the middle of the tray. The carrots work really well right under the chicken. Drizzle them all generously with the oil.

Pop the chicken right on top of the veg in the middle of the tray and rub the oil all over the chicken, then season really well with salt and pepper. The key here is to liberally cover absolutely everything with oil, otherwise you’re dry roasting. And that’s shite.

Roast in the oven for 15 minutes, then crack open the oven door for a few seconds to release that first puff of steam – this will help you get crisp skin. Continue to roast for another 20 minutes, then take the tray out and baste the chicken and veg with all the delicious pan juices. You can give the veg a bit of a gentle stir around if you like.

Return to the oven, turning the tray around as you do. Most ovens cook faster at the back, so this will give your chicken an even cook. Roast for another 15 minutes.

Remove the roasted chicken from the tray and put it on a rack to rest while you continue to cook the veg in the oven for the final 10 minutes.

Carve the chicken and serve with the roasted veg and chicken wing gravy.

1.2kg chicken wings, bashed up or chopped (see the chef’s tip)
1 large onion, quartered
2 carrots, cut into 5cm pieces
2 sprigs of fresh rosemary
1 large bay leaf
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon fine sea salt
1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
100g plain flour
50g butter, diced
2 litres chicken stock (stock cubes or jelly pots are fine)
50ml white wine vinegar
4 sprigs of fresh thyme

Preheat the oven to 200°C.

Arrange the chicken wings, onion, carrots, rosemary and bay leaf on a large baking tray (definitely not a deep-sided roasting tin). Drizzle the whole lot with the oil and season well with the salt and pepper. Toss everything with your hands to make sure all the wings are covered in oil. That way, they’ll go nice and crisp and you’ll get the maximum amount of flavour in your gravy.

When everything is coated, spread it out in the tray so it’s in an even layer. Roast in the oven for about 1 hour, until the wings are golden. If a few are a little burnt looking, that’s no harm. Transfer the chicken wings and veg into a large pot.

Add the flour and butter to the hot tray and give it a good old stir until both are well combined and have formed a paste. This is now a basic roux. Steal a cup of the chicken stock to deglaze the tray, then put the whole tray over a low heat on the hob. Gently cook the lot for 4–5 minutes, constantly stirring and scraping up all the brown bits from the bottom of the tray.

Add the white wine vinegar. After 5 minutes, carefully pour all this liquid into the pot with the wings and veg and add the rest of the chicken stock. Give it all a really good stir.

Cook over a low heat for 30–40 minutes. You don’t want to let this go to a heavy boil, just a low simmer. Every 10 minutes or so, get a potato masher and give it all a big bash to agitate the flavours from the chicken and the veg. After 30 minutes, give it a taste. You might need to adjust the seasoning, so add a pinch of salt if you do. Add the thyme right at the end.

Once you’re happy with the flavour, allow it to sit off the heat for 10 minutes. Strain it through a fine mesh sieve, aggressively squishing out all the chicken wings and veg to get the last of their little flavour bombs out and into the gravy. Try to resist the urge to drink this from a mug, and either pop it in an airtight container in the fridge or freezer or serve with a roast immediately.

And For Mains by Gaz Smith and Rick Higgins is now available in all decent booksellers. Main photograph by Katie Quinn.

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