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Hi, I'm Anzata, a professional chef and culinary instructor, and today I'm going to show you the best way to roast chicken. We'll be going over techniques the pros use to get perfect, juicy, crispy chicken. This is roast chicken 101.
A common pitfall when it comes to roasting chicken is that the breast gets dried out, the skin gets too soggy, and the thighs are undercooked. Flipping the chicken halfway through is going to allow for a juicier chicken breast. It's going to allow for everything to get nice and brown and crispy, so you're really getting the best of all the different techniques when you flip it. [Applause]
What we're going to do is dry brine the chicken, and it's not as intimidating as it sounds. So I'm going to start by drying the chicken. I want to pat it very well dry, get all this moisture off the skin so that the skin can get really nice and crispy, and you can see it looks less glossy, too. I'm just checking inside the cavity; sometimes there's little giblets or something to take out, a little piece of fat. Also, going to dry inside the cavity to get rid of any excess water that will also make it steam.
So the night before you plan on cooking it, take it out, dry it off, season it, and then put it back in the fridge overnight. This will give it enough time for the salt to permeate through the chicken while drying out the skin and retaining the moisture inside the bird. Salting the chicken—I'm going to be pretty generous with it. As much as you can, remember, or plan ahead to do it the night before; it's going to make the world of a difference. Season the back. If you only have time to let it rest for 8 hours, or 4 hours, or even an hour, do what you can; it's going to make a difference. We're going to get inside the cavity, too—nice little sprinkle of salt and some pepper, too.
Now we're going to add some herbs. This is the breast side up; you can see it kind of looks like a heart-shaped. The wings will be on the top, and then the legs are on the bottom; that's how you know you have the right side facing. I'm going to create a little pocket with my fingers, so I'm going to push my finger between the skin and the meat on both sides of the breast, so I've created a little pocket here for our herbs to go. Today we're just going to use thyme. Take a few sprigs; we're going to stuff it inside between the skin and the breast. I like to just use thyme instead of thyme and butter or olive oil; there's enough fat in the skin that it will get really nice and crispy. We're also going to add a little olive oil later when we cook it, but this way we just get a really beautiful fresh herb flavor. I'm not going to stuff anything inside the cavity. At the end of the day, if we're adding ingredients inside the chicken, we're really adding moisture inside the chicken, and then it's going to steam. They add a lot of aroma; your kitchen's going to smell lovely, but it's going to create a soggier chicken. As this cooks, the fat in the skin is going to heat up the herbs as well, and that's going to drip over, and it's going to infuse flavor all around.
Tuck the wings right behind the neckbone; otherwise, you have this small piece sticking out in the oven, and this is what's going to burn up very quickly, and we want it to cook nice and evenly. So now he's laying, lounged out comfortably. I have this on a wire rack on a sheet pan; it's going to allow more air to circulate under the bird, which is going to allow it to dry out nice and evenly. Overnight, just going to arrange it so it fits on the tray evenly, and we're going to go in the [Applause] fridge.
The bird has been in the fridge for 24 hours, dry brining, and I'm going to start by preheating my oven to 475, and I'm going to preheat the cast iron pan that we're cooking it into in the oven for a few minutes. This is our chicken; just took it out of the fridge. You see it already looks quite different from yesterday; the skin is tighter, and it's more dried out; it also looks a little cooked, even though it still looks very raw. So let's get the preheated cast iron out of the oven. I want to be very careful because it is very hot, so I'm keeping that on the handle for now. We're preheating it, so the moment that the bird hits the pan, it's going to start to sear; it's going to start cooking. If the pan is not hot and you put the chicken in directly, it's going to start to get wet and steam rather than have a nice sear to it, so it's, it's going to get a little softer; it's not going to cook as evenly. Do a little bit of oil on the bottom of the pan. Let's get the bird in. We're going to do breast side up, put it in the oven for about 30 minutes, and then take it out and flip it when we start to see some caramelization occur.
So it's been about 30 minutes, so we can do our first flip for the chicken. Every bird is going to be a little different as far as the size goes, and the temperature of your ovens might vary, so we always give a range for times, but you really want to look for indicators. So it looks like it's nice and golden along the top; it's, it's not fully cooked, but that's totally fine. We're going to flip it, so this way the bottom will cook as well, and it will prevent the breast from drying out. So there's going to be a lot more moisture in the thighs and in the legs, and it's going to drip down into the breast, so it cooks evenly and it stays nice and moist, and then we're also going to flip it again for the last 5 or 10 minutes of cooking, so the breast gets a little bit crispy at the end.
Let's check our bird. So it cooked an additional 20 minutes on breast side down, and then for the last 5 minutes, I flipped it over so the breast can get a little bit more coloring again. So we flipped it twice, and now this looks beautiful; it should look nice and golden brown, and the internal temperature, checked around the fattest part of the breast, should be around 155°. We're going to let it rest about 10 minutes. What this is going to do is any residual heat is going to carry over cooking, so it's going to reach the temperature we want; also, it's going to allow the time for the muscles to absorb, uh, more moisture. If we try to cut through it right now, it's hot, and all the juices are going to flow [Applause] out.
So first to carve our chicken, we're going to remove the drumsticks. We want to find where the joint is; it's going to be pretty close to the leg. I use my knife, and you can see the skin breaks here; the leg is right here; the breast is over here, and right before it starts to turn into the thigh is where we're going to cut, and that's our first drumstick, and we'll do the same thing on the other side. Now we want to cut the thigh. So the thigh is right underneath the breast on the bottom and connects to the spine, so I'm going to cut down right where this meat hits the spine, right here. It looks so good; it looks so caramelized. And now the same thing on the other side. Right where the wing meets the neck and the shoulder, we're going to cut, and then the other side slides right off. So I'm using a nice 8-inch chef's knife here; it's nice because it's big, and it's going to fit the size of the chicken, but also I want to make sure I'm using a sharp knife. It might feel scarier to use a sharp knife, but it's much more safe than a dull knife because a dull knife is more likely to miss cutting through the food and slide around and create some danger, whereas a sharp knife is going to glide right through. So there's two breasts along here; just going to cut right through them down the center to separate them. I'm going to saw my way through, and then we're going to find eventually the breast bone, which is right behind them, so I'm sawing, and I can cut pretty much through the bone. This breast here is attached to the backbone; going to cut the backbone off. This part, there's not much delicious meat on it, but it still has a lot of flavor, so we're going to save it for stock.
Now let's slice the breast into smaller pieces. I'm just going to cut this little breast bone off before I slice it, and again, this can also be saved for stock. I think carving a smaller chicken is much more difficult than carving a larger one; a larger one, you can get the drumstick and the thigh still intact, and it's just going to be a little bit easier to work with in general. And then I see the breast bone on the other breast here; get rid of this. We cut across the grain; you can see it's really nice and juicy; looks really tender and delicious. Let's put everything together. There's really no rules, so I'm just going to decorate the plate with some fresh thyme; just tuck them right underneath so it looks very natural. Add some fresh lemon slices, too, and that's how you make the perfect roast chicken. So hopefully this takes away some of the intimidation of getting a big bird; it's so easy to do, and it can be part of your weekly rotation. I'm showing you one way to do it, but it's so versatile as far as what flavors you want to use, and you can use it for so many different other applications. Chicken is such a nice blank canvas, so really feel free to use your own personal thumbprint on it.