Belinda’s 5 Top Tips For Perfecting Your Roast Chicken This Christmas
Some simple tips for perfecting your roast this Christmas
Belinda’s Top Tips For Perfecting Your Roast Chicken This Christmas:
1. Don’t put your chicken in the oven straight from the fridge – allow the bird to sit and come to room temperature first.
2. Ensure that your chicken does not go in the oven wet. Have it uncovered in the fridge for a few hours before cooking to let the skin dry.
3. Always place your chicken in a relatively fitted tin. If there’s too much room around the bird, the juices could burn.
4. Don’t over cook your chicken! Different sources will tell you a variety of different things, but we agree with chef Diana Henry part of the variation is due to the your oven and the quality of the bird. A slow grown free range chicken takes less time to cook compared to a quick growing indoor reared bird. So if it is your first time cooking a large Sutton Hoo Chicken then it is good to be aware of this and adjust timings accordingly to avoid any dry breast fillets.
5. Cooking Times & Resting - we have found that 35 mins per kilogram (16 mins per pound/Ib) in a preheated oven at 180°c/350°F (gas mark 4) works well and then it is essential to rest the chicken (wrapped in tin foil) for half of the cooking time. This allows the bird to continue to cook and retain its moisture because during cooking all the muscle fibers firm up and push out their moisture, which means if you carve straight away, all those juices will pool out. If you let your chicken rest, those fibers will relax and reabsorb their moisture – that juicy meat is worth the wait. Chicken is cooked when the juices run clear after skewering into deepest part of the bird, the leg, if they are pink it is undercooked and you should cook it for a further ten minutes and then try again until the juices run clear.
Check out: The Ultimate Sutton Hoo Chicken Christmas Lunch recipe with all the trimmings
