25 Days of Nourishing Traditions: Roast Chicken

This is such a great, simple way to add great flavor to a basic roast chicken! The recipe is found on page 280 of Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats by Sally Fallon.

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Ingredients

1 roasting chicken about 4 pounds
1 medium onion peeled and thinly sliced
2 whole heads of garlic (optional)
3 tablespoons melted butter
sea salt and pepper
several sprigs thyme oregano, or tarragon
¹⁄₂ cup dry white wine or vermouth
4 cups chicken stock (page 124)
1 tablespoon gelatin
(optional)

If you use the super-amazing Plan to Eat meal planning site, just add me as a “friend” and you can take each of my recipes that I’ve already uploaded, and add them to your recipe box! Then you can plug them into your meal calendar, have instant shopping lists created with all your ingredients, and more! Here’s my PTE link for Roast Chicken.

Instructions

Before you put the chicken into your roasting pan, arrange the sliced onions into the bottom.

Also, put the garlic cut-side down in the pan. The recipe calls for two whole HEADS — not cloves — of garlic. Whoa! I am a total garlic fiend, but I’m also cheap. I didn’t really want to use up two whole heads for this little chicken, especially since I usually only use a few cloves per roast. I figured a whole head would be plenty. Especially since Sally says the garlic is “optional.”

Grab your bird and take out the giblets — but don’t you dare throw those babies away! Even if you’re not quite up to the challenge of eating organs, you can still toss them into your homemade chicken stock, and get much of the nutrients out of them that way. Without slurping down a single slimy liver.

It’s thyme time! Stuff the herbs into the cavity of the chicken.

Now, the best part! Brush the bird with melted butter.

Season with sea salt and pepper…

And bake at 375 for one hour. Then, stick a wooden spoon into it and flip it over, to cook for another hour.

Now, you can have at those roasted garlic heads — Sally mentioned that “softened, individual cloves can be picked out with a fork. They are delicious.” Um, yes. Yes they are. And I’m totally doing two heads next time! I ate these up so fast.

With the pan drippings, Sally actually says you can “pour off the fat if you wish” — HA! Yeah right! Well, I’d usually pour it out into a glass jar to create my totally easy chicken schmaltz, but for the purposes of this dish, I thought that fat would be great to just leave in as a part of the sauce I’d be creating. (I was right. Delicious, fatty sauce was the result!) Pour it all into a saucepan.

Then, add wine and bring to a boil, stirring to loosen the onion slices. Add your stock and reduce the sauce to about half by vigorous boiling. Oh and darn it — I would have loved to include the optional gelatin powder here at this point (you can find healthy, grass-fed gelatin here), but I didn’t have any at the time.

That’s it! Pour the sauce over your chicken pieces and enjoy! And of course, the very best part about roasting a whole chicken is that you can save the carcass and bones to make nourishing stock.

How’d it go?

I’ve made roast chicken before lots of times, so this wasn’t really treading into super new territory for me. But making the reduction sauce and trying my hand at roasted garlic was exciting and different — I loved getting to put a new spin on an old favorite!

How we liked it

We are big fans of this one! The sauce was perfect, the chicken was juicy and flavorful, and again, the roasted garlic was amazing. We will be making NT’s version of roast chicken again many times, I’m sure!

Be sure to check out the other installments of 25 Days of Nourishing Traditions:

And don’t forget to enter to win your two copies of Nourishing Traditions in our giveaway!

Doina says:

December 10, 2011 at 9:01 pm

Oh, my gosh! I loved reading through this post and looking at the pictures. I could just taste that garlic and that chicken looks just mouth watering. I’m going to have to try this. Thanks for posting!