February 2nd - Roasted Chicken

February 2nd – Roasted Chicken
I haven’t roasted a chicken in a couple of months, which is weird for me since I like to roast one at least every two weeks. When the stove went out on New Year’s Eve, the thermostat also went out, which makes roasting or baking a little challenging since it requires a manual process of checking the temperature and turning the oven on and off at the right time, but it can be done. I brined a chicken, like I normally do because it leads to a juicier bird that is also far more forgiving if you overcook part of it. I made some stock with the neck so I would have something to deglaze the roasting pan with to make gravy. I stuck to simple stuff on the side: mashed potatoes and a few onions and carrots in the roasting pan with the chicken. I stuffed the chicken with sprigs of rosemary and some sage leaves out of the garden and then cut a lemon in half and squeezed it into the cavity and then put the squeezed out halves in the cavity as well before trussing the chicken.
A lot of people don’t truss a chicken or just tie the legs together, but trussing is an important step. It helps to make the bird more compact and round for roasting. If you do it right, it brings the wings up slightly over the breast which keeps them from cooking too quickly and getting dried out. Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook has great directions on roasting a chicken including how to truss it. If you don’t know, check the book out. It really is an important step.
It seems that I always drink wine after a day of brewing (and, let’s face it, drinking beer). I pulled a bottle of 1995 Chateauneuf du Pape La Bernadine from Michel Chapoutier. I love Chateauneuf du Pape in general. The wine contains a large amount of Grenache, but is also blended with many other grapes, including some white grapes. Chapoutier is an older producer in the region but the wines in the last 15+ years are now amongst the best wines in the entire Rhone Valley. The La Bernadine had deep rich aromas of cherry fruit and spice, but had a little less spice than Vieux Telegraphe, which is still my favorite Chateauneuf du Pape. It was bigger and richer than a lot of other wines that I’ve had from the region. But the roasted flavors of the chicken and vegetables worked well with its intensity. Luckily my friend Colin is the executive chef for the US distributor and has been stock piling the Chapoutier wines for several years, so with luck I can have another one when I go to Chicago to visit him next.