Rotisserie Chicken

Sunday I decided to make something I hadn't made pretty much all summer: a whole chicken. I am a huge fan of whole roasted chickens, so much so that I made one last Thanksgiving even when we all had colds. Summer is not, however, a great time to run the oven at 425°F. Enter the Ronco Compact Showtime Rotisserie. It's small enough to not take up a ton of space but large enough to make a fryer-sized whole chicken. I don't really use a recipe for this. Here's what I entered into Cozi as my "recipe".

Ingredients 

1 whole chicken, fryer-size (3-4 lbs)
Lawry's seasoned salt
Onion or lemon (optional)

Preparation

Remove giblets and neck and rinse bird inside and out. Sprinkle seasoned salt inside cavity and then rub over the entire outside of the bird. Place sliced onion or lemon inside the cavity, if desired. Stick it on the spit butt-end first and tie on with kitchen string or truss first. Cap the spit and place in the rotisserie. Cook using formula on side of rotisserie, at least one hour or until 165 degrees in thigh and breast, and juices run clear. Allow to rest 5-10 minutes before carving.

So. This time I happened to have one last onion from my farmer's market trip last Wednesday, so I sliced it up and jammed as much of it into the cavity of the bird as I could fit, about half. (It was a rather large onion and a rather small bird.) I trussed the chicken using one of the elastic strings that came with the rotisserie. Regular kitchen string works just as well. There is a neat little disc that you place the end of the spit on so that it stands up, which helps with loading the chicken on. I had a 3.5 lb bird and the formula said 15 minutes per pound, so technically it might have been done at about 52-53 minutes, but I always figure a whole hour for a whole bird. Here are some pictures I took!

Just started

Halfway point

Done!

Resting (digital probe thermometer in the background, love that thing!)

More resting, and my carving tools.

After it was done, I let it rest on the spit, and then on a cutting board I placed inside a cookie sheet. The cookie sheet provides a nice groove for the juices to flow into as I cut, so I don't get my counter ridiculously messy. Google has plenty of guides as to how to carve up a chicken, so I'll let you choose the one that makes sense to you. I couldn't find the one I originally learned from. I started taking pictures of the carving process, but it got too messy to keep going back and forth between the chicken and my phone, so I just took one of the finished product.

Popping out the hip joint

My favorite, the leg quarter!

The whole shebang

I served the meat with some frozen corn and bread and butter. If I'd thought about going to the grocery store again I'd probably have tried to serve some sort of salad/baguette combination, but to be honest, when I make a whole chicken, we tend to eat mostly the whole chicken.

This particular chicken was a Gold'n Plump fryer which I paid too much for ($6.99, about $2 per pound) but the only other less expensive per pound option I could find was a whole roaster which would have been 7 lbs, the same price or more, and wouldn't have fit in my rotisserie. When whole chickens go on sale this winter I will stock up and freeze them, so I'm not stuck paying those prices next time. I have been known to buy 4 or 5 chickens at once when they go to $0.99 per pound. They take a couple of days to thaw in the refrigerator, but if I've planned ahead with my meal plan calendar, I know in advance when to start thawing. The other thing that I could/should have done to make the whole meal more economical would have been to boil the carcass to make homemade chicken stock. One of these days I will actually do it, but Sunday was not that day. ;)

Anyhow. This meat-heavy meal cost about $7.66 for newly purchased ingredients, and the rest I had on hand (probably another dollar or so.) I'm looking forward to sharing my bargain-basement meatless meals soon! Tonight I am making my infamous Linguini with Mushrooms. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow!