James' World 2

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Roasting Roasting a chicken, like cooking a steak, is one of those culinary tasks that inspires strong feelings: Everyone’s always trying to iterate to find the “better” technique, despite the existing classics. While I could likely spend a year testing roast chicken recipes (after which I’d certainly never want to eat another roast chicken), I wanted to compare some popular ones that use diverging techniques. How I wanted to know, does a chicken cooked at a relatively low heat compare with one that starts in a very hot oven? Does a wet brine work, and is it worth it? Surely butter makes everything better, right?

To answer these questions, I embarked on what I dubbed Chickenpalooza, a few chicken-packed weeks I spent testing some of the internet’s most beloved roast chicken methods. Spoiler: I liked them all, but I definitely emerged from the experiment with a standout, surprising technique that I’ll be returning to often, whether for my next dinner party or simply a weeknight meal.

Marcella Hazan’s Roast Chicken With Lemons, Food and Wine

Like Marcella Hazan’s legendary tomato sauce, her recipe for roast chicken — which I had to make, given how many people call it their gold standard — is startlingly simple. It calls for no butter, no oil; just salt, pepper, and two lemons. Hazan explains the latter’s preparation meticulously: “Puncture the lemons in at least 20 places each, using a sturdy round toothpick, a trussing needle, a sharp-pointed fork, or similar implement.”

More technique- than ingredient-focused, this roasting method is “self-basting,” as Hazan describes it. While today that can denote birds that have been “injected or marinated with solution,” what it means in this recipe is that the chicken bakes in its own juices while being infused by the lemons inside its cavity. If the skin is unbroken, Hazan writes that the chicken can “puff up” as it cooks, which seems to be mostly an aesthetic perk. Though I didn’t experience this effect, possibly due to shoddy prep, it ultimately didn’t matter for the eating experience.

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