I suppose it’s possible to ruin a roast chicken, but you’d have to work at it.  Perhaps leg of lamb or a ham is your Easter dinner of choice, assuming you’re not a vegetarian or stone broke in this season of discontent, but a nice economical spring chicken cooks up beautifully, and no cook need be ashamed to serve it to even the most distinguished guest.  None of the ingredients listed here are outrageously expensive in and of themselves, but they taste as if they should be. 

              I happen to love roast chicken, and have been roasting them for years.  They’re like culinary chameleons; almost every country in the world has found some delicious way to cook this ubiquitous bird. You can go with an Asian route and flavor your chicken with sesame oil and soy sauce, plum sauce, or hoisin sauce; chicken and curry is a marriage made in Heaven, or you can take a Mediterranean approach with olive oil, lemon and rosemary. Dijon mustard is a good companion to chicken; paprika gives it a lovely color, as does saffron, if in a different way. Garlic and chicken are excellent together, and whatever method I use, at least one clove of garlic finds its way into the roasting pan, and often I use much more as cooking mellows garlic wonderfully.

            For this recipe, I decided to go with a slightly subtler approach than rosemary.  I love rosemary and love the way it smells, and am never sorry when I cook a chicken flavored with it.  However Rosemary can be a bossy, insistent herb and can even overwhelm an onion. In flavoring terms, it’s like the loud relative that always shouts at the dinner table during holiday meals, forcing everyone else to shout in order to be heard. When I use it, I taste ROSEMARY! with chicken being very much an afterthought.

So instead, today’s herb of choice is tarragon, and lots of it. It’s a rather shy, and subtle savory, licorice-y flavored herb.  Even when used in large quantities, tarragon can be trusted not to overwhelm everything else.   Tarragon would be the  equivalent of the relative who must always be urged to ‘speak up.’    If you can find it at your nursery, it’s easy to grow even if your ‘garden’ consists only of a window box on the umpty-first floor in a Manhattan high rise. It’s worthwhile to grow it or buy it fresh.  Dried tarragon loses much of its potency, in my opinion. While I dislike licorice as candy, I like that licorice taste in savory dishes.   Since chicken and tarragon are modest and mild flavored, they’re delicious together, but other seasonings must not be allowed to overwhelm them.   As far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as “too much tarragon” in cooking.

To roast a chicken according to my method, you will need the following:

1 chicken.  The size is debatable.  If you’re only cooking for two, a whole fryer might be a good bet. But try not to go bigger than three or four pounds –larger birds are older birds and may make for tough eating.  If you’re feeding multiple people, get two medium chickens rather than a single huge one.  

1 bunch tarragon—you probably won’t use the whole thing, but do use it generously.

1 onion—in this case, I used a Walla Walla Sweet, but you can use your favorite kind, whether that’s fierce little white pearl onions, yellow, white or red onions, Sweet Maui or Vidalia—it’s your choice. A sweet onion is good with tarragon though as it’s a mellower taste. I also like the sweet onions because they don't make my eyes water when I cut them up.

Small potatoes—the ones in the picture above are Yukon Gold creamers. You can use white potatoes, fingerlings, or new poatatoes, according to your preference.  Allow 2 potatoes per person.

3-4 TBS Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO)

1-2 TBS  Balsamic vinegar. (I use good, but very ordinary Trader Joe’s balsamic vinegar. The brand you use is up to you.)

2-3 TBS fresh grated parmesan cheese.

Salt and pepper to taste

Garlic to taste

Splash of red or white wine to taste.   (I used Chateau Cheapo Merlot left over from another cooking project earlier this year. I’m not big on drinking wine, but like to cook with it. And no, Chateau Cheapo is not the actual name of the winery —it was just the cheapest bottle I could find.)

In terms of equipment you’ll need

1 roasting pan – today, I used  a 9 x13 rectangular pyrex glass baking dish.

1 cooking fork

1 cutting knife

1 bowl

1 box grater.

1 basting brush.

Oh yes, and an oven!

This will feed four adults with  no leftovers but the carcas, three people, and leave enough for a modest chicken  sandwich and a carcas from which to make chicken broth. Two people can eat half for supper one night and can expect to get another light meal from it the next day.  One person can have a lovely supper that night, a second supper from leftovers and at least one nice sandwich.

Regarding oven temperatures, there’s a lot of discrepancy between cooking schools of thought.  Some cooks like to blast their poor birdie at 425 F for about forty-five minutes, but these people are not me. It may be fast enough for a weeknight, but I don’t want something that looks like it was a witness to the bombing of Dresden.  Nor do I care for any roasting method that calls for the chicken to be slightly underdone.  I find under-cooked poultry revolting, health concerns all aside. On the other hand eating chicken-flavored bath towels is not my idea of delicious, either.  I believe roast chicken should be thoroughly cooked  but still remain moist and juicy.  My roasting method is two hours in a moderate oven with plenty of basting.  So cooks, please preheat your ovens to 325 F

Pour approximately 2-3 TBs of the EVOO into your roasting pan, and add 1-2 TBs of the balsamic vinegar. Don’t measure, just eyeball it. Peel one clove of garlic and use it to spread the oil and vinegar all around over the bottom of the pan.  Feel free to add all the garlic you want at this point if one clove isn’t enough for you, but do use at least one:

Remove your chicken from its wrapper, remove the neck and any giblets from the cavity if they are included—my least favorite phase of this task.  Freeze them, toss them out,  or cook them up for an hors d’oevre, but we won’t be using them in the main dish today. Once the bird is rinsed off and patted dry, place it in the center of your prepared roasting pan:

 Take one or two stems of tarragon from the bunch and strip off the leaves by running your fingers down the stem.

Chop them, but not too fine—you want to bruise the leaves more than chop them to release the flavor. Gently lift the skin from the chicken breast, and tuck the bruised tarragon leaves under the skin against the raw breast meat, then repeat on the other side before pulling chicken skin back into place. See photos  below if this instruction confuses you:

              Tuck tarragon leaves between the skin and the meat on the breast

Pour a bit more EVOO and balsamic vinegar into a bowl and beat together with a fork, adding a bit of salt and pepper to taste.  You can also add a splash of red wine—you’re making a sauce to baste onto the chicken as it cooks. Strip more tarragon leaves from another stem or two (approximately 1 TBS), chop them up a bit finer than before and add them to the basting liquid:

  With your fingers, rub the  EVOO mixture all over the raw chicken. Add more salt and pepper at this point if you think you need more. See below:

Now grate up some parmesan cheese with the fine side of your box grater—2 TBS worth, maybe. You’re not going to bread the whole chicken, just dust the skin with it.  It’s sinful, but makes the skin so crunchy and delicious you can handle it once a year.  This step is optional, though if you don’t care for it or are more virtuous than I am. This is how it should look when you're done:

 

                    Dust chicken with grated  parmesan

Next, take out your onions and potatoes.  Wash the potatoes clean of any visible dirt, but there’s no need to peel them. Cut them in half, or maybe in quarters, if you bought large ones.  Peel your onion and cut it into eighths.  Distribute the cut up onions and potatoes to the roasting pan in a single even layer all around your chicken. 

 If you want, you could put a lemon into the chicken cavity, or some of your cut up onions, or some garlic cloves. Add another splash of wine to the pan, and your bird is ready for the oven. 

 

Into the hot box with you, my dear!

 Oh right, I suppose YOU never talk to your food? 

If you have a timer—I never seem to—set it for 30 minutes and go sit down for a bit with a drink or a newspaper while you let the chicken cook undisturbed. Relax, it takes longer to read all that than to do it.  

One of the secrets of a flavorful, moist roast chicken is frequent basting. After your chicken has been cooking for 30 minutes, start basting the bird with your EVOO balsamic and tarragon basting liquid using a basting brush: 

KEEP basting it every 15 to 20 minutes or so for the next hour and a half.  When you run out of basting liquid, start using the pan juices instead.  When in doubt, BASTE!

When the chicken has been in the oven for about two hours, it should be done unless you bought something the size of an ostrich. The drumstick will wiggle and the juices should run clear yellow, and the skin will be a lovely deep brown without being burned:

Take it out, turn off the oven  and let it sit for a minute, then transfer the chicken and the potatoes and onions to a serving platter.  Pour off the fat, but NOT all the pan juices.  If you want to be fancy, pour the pan juices into a skillet, add more wine and reduce them a bit and put them in a sauce boat for the table. But this is an optional step--spooning the juice as is is fine. Set your table, or make your offspring or guests do it, and serve it forth! 

  Supper time!

 Carve up your bird, and divide the cooked onions and potatoes between all the plates, and spoon some of the pan juices over each person’s portion.  This is good with any green vegetable you like best, or a tossed green salad. Two of my favorite vegetables in the spring are fresh asparagus, or fresh English peas or petits pois.

 Good Food,

Good Meat,  Good God,

Let's Eat!