So, even though making it isn’t a regular thing with me, I have the basic idea and I’m not really leery about going there; the basic oil or butter for the skin, salt & pepper throughout, halved lemons and rosemary in the cavity, cook according to your customary ovenological practices, and Bob’s yer uncle. Could vary it with adding onions and carrots inside, or using oregano and/or thyme for or in addition to the rosemary, all that. Simplicity itself.
What I want to know is, has anybody here used oranges in place of, or in addition to, the lemons? That is the question. Somehow I think it might be really good, but I’m not best ready to experiment on others without some prior advice.
Other interesting departures from the above, even those careening wildly, are most welcome for my future reference. But it’s about the oranges first, please.
So being in a bit of a rush I threw caution to the winds and went ahead with the orange rolled, pricked, and sliced in half, and fresh thyme and oregano, beyond the basics of melted butter, salt, and pepper. Laid it in a baking dish on a bed of carrots and thickly-sliced red onions, to be roasted at 425F (218.333C) for 15 minutes, then for an hour-ish at 375F (190.556C - you know, metric is awfully fussy, isn’t it ).
I did the quartered oranges inside the cavity of the chicken a few times. I didn’t think there was anything exceptional to waste a perfectly good orange that I could eat.
It does sound tempting especially when a person has excellent Orange Chicken at a Chinese restaurant. But that’s it. Now if I could just achieve Orange Chicken and have enough people who were interested in sharing a batch with me, that I would do.
A while back, my sister made a roast turkey, and I think she used orange in it somehow. However she did smother the whole thing in bacon. Easily the best turkey I had ever had in my life. It was juicy and flavorful. Gone in a heart-beat, and we normally have leftovers that end up being eaten for the next few weeks straight… I’ll have to get the recipe from her sometime.
I love stuffing (basic bread, butter, and poultry seasoning), so oranges or lemons in the cavity are kind of anathema to me. I don’t do anything beyond salt and pepper on the skin, but do baste generously after it starts rendering some juices. The skin is always nice and crispy this way.
I had nightmares last night about supplicants filing into a deep, dark cave and throwing themselves prostrate at the truncated feet of a giant broaster.
“PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE COUNTER!!”
And by the way, I don’t know how it is where the rest of you people live, but hereabouts it’s definitely cheaper to buy a broasted chicken at the store and risk looking like a sad bachelor for it, than to roast a chicken yourself for all the fine Jamie Oliver-y things you can do to it. When I saw the price of the raw bird I just about fainted, but I was already committed.
It’s a subtle effect so far as the bird goes; most people wouldn’t necessarily notice it but I believe they would side-by-side with a plain roast chicken with no aromatics, just salt and pepper. Again, it’s way subtle, but there’s the wisp of suggestion of a hint of a darker, more sultry quality to the bird’s flavor than with lemon, which lends brightness. I like sultry.
Odd, I’ll have to check next time I go shopping, although our store usually just has rotisserie. I’m sure that the store can use the neck and other parts to make stock, so it makes some sense. After using the Joy of Cooking’s method of flipping the bird over partway through, buying the precooked stuff just seems so lazy now.
Do you mean as opposed to broasted, or raw? TBH, I don’t know what the heck those pre-cooked birds are; I just say “broasted” because A) it’s what they called such chickens in my youth, and B) it’s only half as many syllables as the other.
Well, I think saying “rotisserie” is too much work, so there you go. They are handy, though, and I make soup after. Nothing lazy about that.
I do suspect those pre-roasted birds have been brined, because it seems to me the meat is a bit saltier than it would be normally. So that’s a health consideration.
Don’t really have the broasted stuff, from what I can tell that would be like KFC. The raw birds are common at Sewards Co-op, along with duck and some other odds and ends. I don’t know if they brine their rotisserie, but it probably has salt rubbed on the skin.
It does make a good stock, something I wouldn’t do with anything breaded.
Back in the day, I recall that store-bought rotisserie chicken was often called, and advertised in their rotating warming thingamabobs as, “broasted”. Having Googled, I now agree that this was evidently an incorrect usage, and probably a cynical or at least ignorant marketing gambit. I shall change my errant ways forthwith. I wouldn’t use breaded bird in a stock, either.
Yes, but that’s a topping at the last moment, not a long-stewed component of the broth itself. They’ll go one farther and put crunchy fried tempura batter bits on top of some soups (noodle dishes in broth, really, not soups in their sense of the concept), too.
).
Easily the best turkey I had ever had in my life. It was juicy and flavorful. Gone in a heart-beat, and we normally have leftovers that end up being eaten for the next few weeks straight… I’ll have to get the recipe from her sometime.