Please put Mrs, Beast on!

Lately I've been craving a really really good roast chicken. What's the best equipment/technique to achieve this? None of this taking off the skin, either.

The Great Beast - 11:31 am PDT - Oct 11, 1999  - #906

Hot hot hot. You have to cook it really damned hot, hotter than you would think reasonable, but that's the ticket.

First, rub yon chicken with herbs, salt and pepper. I favour sage, thyme, rosemary, garlic and lemon juice. Stuff the squooshed out lemon halves inside the body cavity, along with the stems from the rosemary and the thyme and sage. Liberal with that salt and pepper.

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Put the chicken in for 10-15 minutes, and turn it down to 350 until just cooked. This will mean the flesh is very juicy, but when a joint is poked, the juice runs clear, not cloudy-pink.

Fresh crusty bread, a crisp bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, some cheese and olives, and howls to the moon.

Mrs. Beast is busy writing a business plan for her new venture, and unlike myself, would feel guilty playing on the internet. But she does send her regards, and wishes to inform that if she told even the smallest of 'how odd Mr. Beast is' stories, she would feel terrible about all the sprained muscles and shortness of breath descriptions of my idiocy would bring.

Hmmpf.

The Great Beast - 11:43 am PDT - Oct 11, 1999  - #908

Oil as a medium to carry spices and herbs, but no basting. No peeking or opening the oven until about 25-30 minutes, and it's done when it's done: different chickens, weights, ovens etc, but just over half an hour for your modern 2.5 lb fryer (if you can find a real roaster, longer, and count yourself really lucky).

Roast in a pyrex dish, or in a steel or aluminum pan. I use a steel frying pan, so I can degrease it after cooking, deglaze with a little of the wine, and serve this as jus for drizzling over the bird and mopping up with bread.

Serin McDaniel - 11:50 am PDT - Oct 11, 1999  - #909
I believe that Walt Whitman loves me personally.

The last three times I've bought chickens labeled "roaster," once roasted they've been so tough that you literally could not get a fork through the skin. From this I drew the conclusion that when they said "roaster" they really meant "cook this sucker in lots of liquid" and that if I wanted a significant quantity of roasted chicken, I needed to cook two fryers.

Which is all leading up to the question: How do you buy a chicken for roasting?

Mebbe you got a bad butcher who sold you stewing hens as roasters.

First off, know your butcher. Major grocery stores are run by greed besotted Satanism fiends from planet salmonella: do not buy anything but toilet paper and beer from them. Go to a real butcher, who ages and processes their own carcasses.

Second, talk to said butcher, and be prepared to pay more than major grocery store prices for a real bird experience.

As an edit to my above post, when dressing the bird for roasting, I always break the thigh joint at the body and at the leg. This ensures that the meat around the socket is cooked at the same rate as the breast, so you don't have to over cook one part to eat another.

With ducks, I cook the breast and the legs separately, for the same reason.