I know that sometimes cooking a whole chicken can feel less convenient than just picking up chicken breasts at the store, but stick with me while I try to convince you it’s worth the little bit of extra effort and time.
This is the first step in making many meals out of a whole chicken. First comes roasting day which is a special meal in itself. The crackling chicken comes out of the oven making your entire house smell like Thanksgiving. I like to make a whole chicken on Sunday or Monday getting our weekly meals off to a great start. The next day I pick any leftover meat for topping on salads or tacos, before throwing all the bones into a pot with carrots, onion, celery, herbs, and cold water. I bring it to a gentle simmer for 30 minutes and strain. Voila, chicken broth!
Now I go through the strained bones again, and while they are still warm but cool enough to touch, I pick more meat off the bones to make a soup. When you chill the strained broth, the chicken fat will naturally rise and solidify on top of the stock. You can skim this off with a spoon and use this for sauteing potatoes or veggies.
This utilization of the whole chicken is no small thing. When we roast a whole chicken it easily feeds us for 3-5 meals by doing the roasted chicken-picked chicken-some kind of chicken soup method. It makes meal planning easy for the week–Roasted chicken! Tacos! Soup! It’s also incredibly cost-effective. Let’s say I go to the farmers market or store and pay anywhere from $15-$30 for the whole chicken depending on the size and if it’s organic, pastured, etc. Even though we will add other ingredients to our meals, it’s still the star of the show.
Let’s look at it conservatively though and say my family of four gets only three meals out of it (we always get more if we make soup) and we pay $25 for the chicken. That comes to about $2.00 per meal worth of chicken and/or broth. Have I convinced you yet?
There are a million delicious recipes out there for roasted chicken. After many years of trying all kinds of methods, I found that the most simple method–dry cooking, is my favorite. It’s also the easiest. I came to this conclusion one night when I had run out of time for anything else aside from throwing the chicken in the oven as fast as humanly possible. Essentially it involves seasoning the chicken with just salt and pepper, resulting in a crispy skin and loads of flavor. Recently I fell in love with adding smoked paprika to this mix, but any dry spice or herbs will do.