For a recipe titled "For Les Paresseux (lazy people)", this roast chicken has some expectations to live up to. Honestly, there are plenty of things that lazy people can make without expending much effort but if it is not delicious, what is the point? For all intents and purposes, it would be a waste of good ingredients. However, judging by my past experiences with Dorie Greenspan's recipes, I have enough confidence that the dish will turn out well. So I went ahead and splurged for a 4.9lb whole chicken from one of the better butcher shops in town. True to the lazy spirit, the chicken was pristine (alas, that means no giblets), trussed, and ready for some (cooking) action.
I'm pleased to report that it was worth the splurge. Total active time for this recipe? 10 minutes. And I wasn't working particularly fast. Within that short amount of time, I greased the Dutch oven, lined it with bread, seasoned the chicken, arranged the aromatics, drizzled the whole thing with olive oil and Côtes du Rhône, and sent it to the oven. I used a combination of rosemary, thyme, and sage because I did not have oregano on hand. The garlic that I used was grown locally and very heady. As you can see from the picture, there was not much room in the 5qt pot to fit in root vegetable so I simply roasted the chicken for 90 minutes straight as the recipe called for. The timing was perfect.
Can you see the blistered skin from the picture? Oh yes, the skin was crispy. Underneath that, the meat was juicy. That's fulfilling two key criteria for good roasted chicken. My typical approach to roast chicken involves painstakingly seperating the breast meat from the skin and massage in plenty of herbed butter. That's really too intimate for my taste so I'm doubly pleased that this recipe omits this step yet the result remains very satisfying.
There is one slight disappointment though. The bread that everyone enthused, in my case, was nothing to write home about. It was greasy, pliable, and soggy with pan juice. Other than the fact that it prevented the chicken from sticking to the bottom of the Dutch oven, I felt a bit robbed of the precious pan juice that I could otherwise fashion into a nice gravy. However, what did NOT go to waste was the roasted garlic. I easily extracted the sweet cloves to flavour a roasted squash parsnip mash to serve with the chicken. Of course I took full advantage of the hot oven to roast some squash while the chicken was cooking. The frugal side of me smiled ear to ear as I found ways to make sure nothing goes to waste.
Don't forget to check out what others made this week on French Fridays with Dorie!
