Can this simple recipe set itself apart?

Time: 2 Hours

Ingredient Availability: 5/5

Difficulty: 1/5

This blog has taught me a lot. One of the most prominent of those lessons is that lemon makes almost everything better. So, a lemon roasted chicken should be better than a  “regular” roasted chicken, right? That’s what I’m going to find out in this analysis. Another reason why I chose this recipe is that it was one of the highest rated recipes on Food52 for 2023. Does it deserve a 4.4 star rating out of 5?

Key Ingredients & Omissions:

Just use everything that this recipe asks for and you should be fine. It says to use a good quality olive oil, but I don’t think that you’ll get a much worse using a store brand olive oil. I would recommend getting a relatively small chicken, closer to the 4 pounds the recipe calls for, as a bigger one has a hard time fitting in the skillet and will obviously take longer to cook. Also, I used cooking wine instead of drinking wine.

Tools:

• Cast Iron Skillet

Cooking Review:

Butterflying/ Spatchcocking Chicken: 8 Minutes

After preheating my oven to 450 degrees, I removed the backbone from the chicken and pressed the breastbone until the chicken was relatively flat.

Herb Mix: 11 Minutes

To make the herb mix, I removed the leaves from some of the thyme and put them in a blender along with the other spices and salt. I pulsed the blender until the thyme was broken down. I then mixed in the olive oil and set the mixture aside.

Preparing the chicken for baking: 18 minutes

I cut the lemon in slices and arranged them in the cast iron plan, followed by sliced onions and garlic. I then put the chicken in the pan upside down and brushed it with the herb mixture before flipping the chicken, patting they skin side down and brushing it with the remaining oil mixture.

Baking: 1 hour 30 minutes

I baked the chicken for 30 minutes then added the cooking wine, returning the chicken to the oven. The recipe says to cook the chicken for 10-15 more minutes, but my chicken, being larger, took about 50 minutes until it was done. After this, I let the chicken rest, drizzled with fresh lemon juice and covered with aluminum foil, for 10 minutes.

Analysis:

The first piece that I had was very juicy and tender with a nice lemon flavor. I liked how the caramelized skin complemented the bright flavors from the lemon. The sauce was also nice, with a good balance of chicken and lemon flavor, which would go nicely over a bed of rice. Overall, the chicken was well seasoned, which kinda surprised me considering the amount of salt used for such a large chicken. Even the breast remained moist and flavorful. With that being said, I’ll give this recipe a 9/10. I think if the skin had stayed crispier and was a little more caramelized, I would’ve had more of those nice flavor peaks I explained earlier. In any case, this was pretty easy to make and resulted in something I’d love to have again.