This weekend’s adven­ture is whole roast chicken and chicken stock. The chicken is an organic chicken from Whole Foods. The price per pound is very rea­son­able: $2.99. While at the store I also pur­chased veg­eta­bles and herbs for stock-making: onion, celery, carrot, and thyme. I already have garlic, whole pep­per­corn, and bay leaf.

Chicken is a bit easier to roast than turkey in part because of the reduced size. My chicken is a very good size at 5 lbs. According to Best Recipe, this should take about and hour and a half to fully cook (about 45 min­utes for 3 lbs, just over an hour for 4 lbs). Also, they rec­om­mend you not truss the bird so that the meat on the inside of the thigh can receive more heat. Prepa­ra­tion was there­fore simple: rinse, dry, rub with olive oil, season, and place a few cloves of garlic in the cavity.

The lighter weight also makes it easier to turn the bird while it cooks, evenly dis­trib­uting the heat and mois­ture. The chicken will cook 15 min­utes each side and then breast-side up for the remainder of the time. As I write this, I am enjoying the aroma of the Tai­wanese pepper-salt that I used to season the outside.

The breast meat reached 160℉ after an hour and 15 min­utes of cooking time. Unfor­tu­nately, the chicken also made a ter­rible mess of the oven. Oil used to coat the chicken dripped into the pan and heated to the smoke point. Then, mois­ture from the meat dripped into the oil and exploded every­where. It never occurred to me to turn on the hood fans while using the oven, but I had to in this case to keep the smoke alarm from going off. Taking the chicken out of the oven was a tricky task. I had to wait until the water and oil stopped splat­tering, quickly hoist the whole pan onto a trivet, and then cover it with alu­minum foil to keep it from con­tin­uing to splash while the meat was resting. I took all of the nec­es­sary pre­cau­tions and kept myself from being burned by hot oil and hot water.

The meat is moist, tasty, and cooked almost to per­fec­tion. It could have used another 15 min­utes to make sure that every­thing was cooked all of the way, but we’re plan­ning to reheat and recook the chicken in other dishes so it’s not a con­cern. The skin was crispy and tasty on the top but a bit soggy and greasy on the bottom where the oil and water set­tled. It occurs to me that coating the chicken in oil might not even be nec­es­sary. Per­haps I need to use less oil. Regard­less, the task of dis­man­tling the chicken was an enjoy­able one as we munched while we sep­a­rated the meat from the bones. Here’s the results:

4 pounds, 14 ounces whole chicken yields
1 pounds, 2 ounces scraps for chicken stock and
1 pounds, 14 ounces. meat

The remaining weight is accounted for by ren­dered fat, evap­o­rated mois­ture, giblets, dis­carded skin, and all the stuff we ate while cleaning the car­cass (more than a few ounces; even the cat got sev­eral bites). The chicken cost $14.65, or roughly $7 per cooked pound. In addi­tion, I hope the scraps (bones, left over meat, a little skin) will yield at least 4 cups of stock (I got 8 from a 10.5 pound turkey). Nor­mally, 4 cups of organic chicken stock from the super­market will cost $4.

Quite a bit of the meat we pulled went into a Japanese curry for dinner. We get the curry in little cubes at the Asian market and make a sauce with it. In addi­tion to chicken, the dish includes carrot, onion, and potato. This time we added some celery (we have so much, we need to use it for some­thing). Japanese curry is one of my favorite reg­ular meals. It’s rich, slightly spicy, and very satisfying.

The stock is pre­pared the way Michael Ruhlman rec­om­mends: put the car­cass in a pot, cover it with water, bring to a boil, and then stick it in the oven and forget about it. I forgot it for about 3 hours. Then I chopped carrot, celery, onion; mashed some garlic, and added bay leaf, pep­per­corns, and fresh thyme. After mixing it all in and bringing the liquid back to a boil, I stuck it in the oven again and forgot it for another 2 hours or so. Playing Quake Live makes the time vanish.

I strained the stock twice: once through a sieve and then once through cheese­cloth. Like my turkey stock, it tastes a little flat because I did not add any salt. I’ll add salt when I pre­pare some­thing. It does convey the essence of chicken flavor, which is what it should do. And I was lucky. I think I got about 8 cups total. That should be enough stock for two dif­ferent applications.

I may have con­sumed quite a bit of chicken, but the chicken con­sumed the majority of my day. When you include shop­ping time and clean-up (and there was much cleaning to be done), dealing with the chicken and stock took up quite a bit of time and required sig­nif­i­cant effort. I think it was worth it, though. I don’t know that I’ll do this every weekend (making stock and baking bread at the same time would require two ovens) but I’ll def­i­nitely make stock more often.

Before the next time, how­ever, I need to pur­chase a proper roasting pan.