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Roasted chicken is so special to me because it's something that we would eat every Sunday growing up. Every French family poulet rôti du dimanche, which means roasted chicken on Sunday. It just reminds me of going to the market with my dad and just buying everything and coming home and doing this very simple dish but that is full of flavor. We're making the ultimate French roasted chicken and we're starting with the compound butter. A compound butter is a butter that we flavor. It could be anything. Could be garlic, it could be parsley. It could be extremely complicated or very simple. So, the compound butter is super important because this is what's going
to really baste the chicken and give the flavor. A bit of Espelette pepper, which I love, comes from the Basque Country. Extremely delicious. Not too spicy. [snorts] Very fragrant. I just love the color also it brings. It gives this really nice golden color to the chicken, which is just for me like so beautiful. We need to add some parsley, chopped. The idea is to really just pick the leaves, not the stems. We will use the stems though to put inside the chicken. So, what you want is to roughly chop into the butter.
Right now, what we need to add, lemon zest for this very bright acidic taste that's going to give a nice aroma. I also am someone that puts lemon juice in my chicken at the end. I know this is controversial, not every family does that. My mom would put lemon on everything. In the meantime, I'm just going to let the butter outside. It's very important because you want the butter first of all to be easily spreadable and also everything that you put in the fridge kind of neutralizes taste and right now we're leaving at room temperature, everything is developing and you're going to have an amazing aroma at the end. Okay, garlic.
One of the best ingredients in the world. So, confit garlic is cooking garlic in some sort of fat. It could be anything. It can work with beef tallow, with butter, with anything that will encapsulate the moisture and slow cook. Garlic in a pan, some olive oil or any oil or anything you have in your house. And the idea is to just cover the garlic. Also, do not throw the oil after. It's delicious in vinaigrettes, and also just reusing to cook a steak, to cook anything that you want vegetables. It will just give this amazing garlic aroma without actually using garlic. Put it on
medium high heat. This will give us room to cook it quite fast without burning. The garlic looks amazing. What you're looking for is just a light color. You don't want it too dark just because it's going to be bitter. So, this is perfect. I'm just going to add probably like three to four cloves to my butter. And here I'm just going to mush it with my spoon. Very easy. So, this is what we're looking for in terms of consistency. Something that is spoonable, that is easy, that is nice and aromatic. I can smell the flavors. Let's put it to the side. And get the chicken going. This chicken has been drying for a few days. It helps with obviously the moisture of the skin. Because it's dry, it's going to absorb
everything that is wet that's going to come on top. And it will just be a better vessel for the compound butter. So, this chicken obviously looks extremely different from what you see in grocery stores, even butchers to be fair. Like it's golden chicken from Pennsylvania. Very fatty. It's also a chicken that you can see here is quite muscular. And it will develop the flavor and just give something that is reminiscent to what we get in France. Obviously, if you cannot find this chicken, the best thing you can do is go to a butcher. First of all, see if they have different chickens. If they do, ask for maybe the one that stayed outside the longest, the one that has maybe a
bit more fat. The fresher the chicken, the more you're going to be able to dry age it in your fridge. I keep the feet in the chicken just because I like the look of it. I think it's nice. It looks a bit dramatic. But also because when it crisps up in the oven, it's so delicious. First thing though, is to salt the inside of the chicken. It's kind of like brining your poultry. I'm not going to salt the exterior part just because I already put a lot of salt in the compound butter. We're going to add all the aromatics before trusting the chicken. So, we're going very simple. A big amount of thyme, two bay leaves, and then all the parsley stalks that I used. The idea is to reuse it. We need to truss it. This is really what's going
to give you a very homogeneous cooking because everything is going to be tied together and it's going to make sure that the white part is going to cook as much as the thighs and not have this very uneven uh chicken cooking. You just need some butcher's twine. So, you want something that the twine to go under the two wings. Basically, like that. You want to feel like it's holding. And then, you're going to do a cross like that. This cross needs to go in between each legs. And then you're going to go under here, under the legs, and tie. Very simple. This is really the basic trussing technique. So, the idea here is now is to put the butter.
We're focusing on the breast. It's the part that gets dry the fastest when you're roasting. And then, you want to put a bit on each thigh. And also, like let's not forget that the chicken is going to drip. It's going to go on the sides, so it doesn't to be perfect. One stick of butter is perfect for one chicken. If you want to be even more French, you can put two, but I think that's enough. I like to roast the chicken dry first with the vegetables, just because it's going to crisp up the skin. It's going to also going to crisp up the potatoes and the onions, and then I add moisture to kind of like have something that is really nice and cooked through. We're going to take a roasting tray.
What I like about these trays is this thing. This will separate the chicken from literally touching the bottom of the pan, and it's going to ensure that the bottom part, because it's not in contact directly with the tray, it's not going to get soggy. So, you can get a really crispy chicken everywhere. Okay, [snorts] chicken is done. It's hanging out behind me, and now it's time to cut some veg and add it to the pan. This is really the three basic ingredients that you'll find in most roasted chicken all over France. The potato really adds this nourishing, you know, soaking up all the juices. The onion, when it's like nice and caramelized, is just so good and
brings a sweetness. And the carrot, I love just how carrots get when they're roasted for so long, kind of like nearly a bit chewy. We're going to go very easy on these veg. The idea is not even to peel them. Uh I think that the peel in every vegetable is delicious, it's nutritious, it's also where you find all the vitamins. We're going to prep the carrots first. We're going to take the top off. I like to keep a bit of the green. I think visually it's nice. And I just take the tip off.
Just like that. And then we're going to rinse them. Those stems can work for a few things. I like to use them in like a scrap broth, that's what I call it. So, I would use the outside of the onion, the stems of the carrots. You could use pretty much anything, and it's a great way to kind of utilize all the scraps. I like to put them all in the freezer, and at the end of the week you have the scraps from a whole week and then you can start doing something with it. If you want a quick chicken, you need to cut your veg a bit smaller because that's how they're going to be cooked through. And if you're looking for something like a chicken that's cooked for 2 and 1/2 hours, honestly, I would even leave some like potatoes whole because they're going to roast for so
long. You want to kind of make sure that the vegetable is cooked through but not completely disintegrated in the recipe. Since I'm roasting for roughly like an hour and 20 minutes, that's what I'm looking for. Roughly this size. See? I like the bias just because visually it's also nicer, I think. Everything that's not square just encapsulates better like the sauces, it grabs flavor. Put the veg a bit everywhere. It's really not important to be precise here. Here we're going to start salting. And now we're going to dice some onions. When you're cooking, especially in a small space, you always try and adapt
and make sure that you work methodically to make sure that the kitchen is not a mess. So I like to chop things as soon as I don't have space, I put it in the pan and then I clean up and then I dice again just to make sure it doesn't get overwhelming and then you're not left with like a bunch of mess to clean after lunch. I'm just going to salt again, a last layer for the onion on top. The garlic oil is going to give us so much flavor for all the veg. And just like make sure we don't waste anything. So we're going to put the chicken in the oven for roughly 45 minutes, depending again on your oven. I like to put full fan, start at 350
and maybe after 30 minutes bump it up to 380 Fahrenheit for another 10 to 15 just to make sure we have a nice golden color. The chicken has been roasting for roughly like 45 minutes, so we're halfway there. Uh the idea now is to kind of deglaze the pan, bring a bit of moisture to make sure that the chicken doesn't dry up. We can see that the juice there is some dripping in the bottom. Some veg are getting caramelized. What you're looking here is to add moisture. So, we're going to add moisture with a bit of white wine and some chicken stock. The reason we put white wine in roasted chicken is really to bring acidity, balance, have a bit of also complexity. Kind of deglaze the bottom of the pan.
Make sure that everything kind of unsticks to the bottom. With all the aromatics and the veg that's cream more of a like a bright recipe, I feel like white wine makes more sense. But if I was doing something made with sunchokes, with parsnip, something a bit more wintery, maybe I'd lean towards a red wine. I like to get chicken stock from the butchers. I feel like it has way more collagen than the one that we find like in the shelf in the supermarket. It just brings more depth. We're going to put it back in. Okay, it's been an hour and like 25 minutes. So, we're ready to get the chicken out of the oven.
Let's see how it looks. It looks very nice. How do we know it's cooked? Very simple. We're just going to poke the knife in different areas. If we get some juice released, it means that it's cooked. If it's not cooked, you're not going to see any moisture coming out just because, I mean, it's not cooked. It's raw. Here on the thigh here, you see a lot of moisture coming out. The thigh is the most important because this is also what takes the longest to cook. So, you want to make sure that you're not carving a chicken that it might be cooked on the breast, but the thighs are not cooked and then you have to re-cook them separately. In France, we do everything kind of by the feel and this is how I learned how to cook. So, so yeah, just poke the
chicken. What you're looking for is you let it rest a bit. If you cut it right now, it's just going to release so much moisture that it's just not going to be very enjoyable. And then we're going to create this sauce ready to take all the juices that we got from uh from the chicken. We're going to get all of the veg out and just finish the sauce with a few ingredients. Put the pan back on the heat. High heat. You really want to go fast on this. You want to reduce. You just want to add maybe a bit of espelette, lemon juice, demi-glace. And that's pretty much it.
Black pepper. Demi-glace is basically just a reduction of the chicken bones with red wine and some stock. And this kind of brings this restaurant quality sauce that is quite hard to replicate at home. I might want to add just a cube of butter. Just to make sure it's nice, silky, kind of like monte the sauce, which means like incorporating the butter with the whisk. Without a whisk here. This is luxury right here. [clears throat] So good. Very good. Happy. Carving a chicken, everybody has different ways of doing it.
What I like to do is start obviously by thigh. In the thigh, you're looking to break a muscle that's roughly here. So you're going to kind of like pull it towards you. You know, it's going to slip. So just use, you know, a clean towel. You want to make sure you take the oyster, which in France we call it the sot-l'y-laisse. The sot-l'y-laisse is known to be like the best part of the chicken. I think it's also like an old myth, like something that people said years ago and it kind of sticked. And so everybody's like raving about this part. I don't necessarily think
it's the best part. I think it's extremely moist and tender. You can see that it doesn't fall apart because you see it's the chicken that ran and there is some muscle that you don't find in other chickens. We're going to go straight into the breast. So, the idea here is to really separate both. You just like go for it, you know? You kind of like break it and it will work. So, here the breast, you want to make sure you're taking everything. Because sometimes when it's hot and you're carving, you're kind of like in a rush and you don't want to take too long and you kind of miss like the half of the breast that's like stuck to the bone. So, here I'm taking my time.
I'm a chiropractor. I already dislocated the whole thing. I didn't I barely did any knife work. And we're just going to let it like this and then we're going to kind of like divide it to make sure everybody has a nice piece. Everything that's on this cutting board, you do not want to throw it away. You want to kind of like scrape everything [snorts] and get everything back in your sauce. And now we're going to kind of like divide to make sure everybody has a nice piece. So, my favorite piece in the chicken is the white part, the breast. Feel like it's controversial. People say it's like bland, but I kind of like it.
I'm cutting on the skin side down to make sure you have the weight of the knife because sometimes when you cut like that, especially if your knife is not sharp, you're going to tear the skin apart before you're even cutting the meat. It's funny there was like a touch of pink when I carved it and just by the time it rests, it's like perfectly cooked. Now it's time to plate. So, I like to put some vegetables in the bottom first just so it kind of like takes all the juices. We're going to take each piece of meat and season it on the inside. Just make sure you have salt everywhere. If you're cooking on Sundays, usually you're cooking for like family, loved ones. It's a moment of taking care of people. So, make it nice.
It doesn't need to be crazy in terms of presentation, but make sure you take your time and put the chicken in a nice way and make sure that you show that you love the ones you cook for. Then we're just going to finish with the sauce putting all the juices back in the sauce. Okay, this is poulet rôti du dimanche, which means the roasted chicken on Sunday. It literally takes me back home. A lot of memories growing up. The oyster is as good as ever. The quality of the chicken really shines. There's so much chicken flavor that you don't feel like you have a lot of roast chicken.
It's exactly what I want to eat on Sunday.
