How to Roast a Whole Chicken and Use Every Bit

A whole chicken is one of the cheapest ways to feed a household, but most people roast it badly and then bin the best part. The aim here is twofold: get the bird itself right, and treat the leftovers and the carcass as the start of two or three more meals. A 1.6kg to 1.8kg chicken will feed four at dinner and still leave enough for lunch and a pot of stock.

Buy the right bird and prep it properly

Go for a bird around 1.6kg to 2kg. Smaller and it dries out before the legs cook; much bigger and the breast overcooks while you wait for the thighs. If you have time, take it out of the fridge 45 minutes before it goes in so it cooks more evenly.

The single most useful thing you can do is dry the skin. Pat it all over with kitchen paper, then leave it uncovered in the fridge for a few hours, or overnight if you can. Wet skin steams; dry skin crisps. Just before roasting, rub it with soft butter or oil and season generously with salt, including a good pinch inside the cavity. Do not wash the chicken under the tap. It does nothing useful and just sprays bacteria around your sink.

Don't throw away the giblets if they come with the bird. The neck and gizzard go straight into the roasting tin to deepen the gravy, and the liver is worth saving for a Chicken Liver Pate Recipe later in the week.

Roast it so the breast stays juicy

Heat the oven to 200C fan (220C conventional). Sit the chicken breast-side up on a few thick slices of onion or a halved lemon, which lifts it off the base and lets heat circulate. A rough guide is 20 minutes per 500g plus an extra 20 minutes, so a 1.8kg bird needs about 1 hour 30 minutes.

Forget the timing chart if you have a thermometer, because that is the only reliable test. Push the probe into the thickest part of the thigh, not touching bone, and pull the bird out at 74C. With no thermometer, pierce the thigh and check the juices run clear with no pink.

The mistakes that catch people out:

• Skipping the rest. Tent the chicken loosely with foil and leave it for 15 to 20 minutes before carving. Cut into it straight away and the juices run out onto the board instead of into the meat.
• Basting constantly. Every time you open the oven the temperature drops. Leave it alone.
• Trusting the pop-up timer. They tend to trigger well past 74C, by which point the breast is dry.

While it rests, tip most of the fat out of the tin, set it over a low flame, scrape up the sticky brown bits with a splash of wine or water, and whisk in a spoon of flour for gravy.

Carve it to get the most meat

Work on a board with a lip to catch the juices. Remove the legs first by cutting through the skin between thigh and breast, bending the leg back until the joint pops, then cutting through it. Take the breasts off whole by cutting down one side of the breastbone, following the ribcage with your knife, then slice each breast across into thick pieces so they stay moist.

The bits people miss are the two oysters, the little nuggets of dark meat tucked into the back near the thigh sockets. They are the best mouthfuls on the bird, so dig them out with a teaspoon. Pull off any meat clinging to the wings and back too, and keep those scraps in a separate bowl for the recipes below.

Turn the carcass into stock

This is the step most people skip, and it is where the real value is. Once stripped, the carcass plus the roasting-tin scraps will give you a litre or more of stock for almost nothing.

Break the carcass up so it fits in a pan, add the neck and any wing tips, then cover with cold water. Throw in a roughly chopped onion (skin on for colour), a carrot, a stick of celery, a couple of bay leaves and a few peppercorns. Bring it to a gentle simmer and never let it boil hard, or the fat emulsifies and the stock turns cloudy and greasy. Skim off any scum in the first ten minutes. Leave it ticking over for 2 to 3 hours, then strain.

A few things worth knowing:

• Salt at the end, not the start, because the liquid concentrates as it reduces.
• Cool it quickly and keep it in the fridge for up to four days, or freeze it. An ice-cube tray gives you handy splashes for gravy and sauces.
• A good homemade stock is the backbone of a proper Rosol (Polish Chicken Soup), which uses both the broth and any shreds of meat you simmered off the bones.

Use up the leftover meat

Cold roast chicken is a head start on a dozen meals, so resist eating it all straight from the fridge. The breast slices neatly into a Vietnamese chicken salad, where the herbs and dressing wake up meat that can taste a bit flat the day after.

The darker scraps and oysters, too ragged to slice, are ideal stirred through a Chicken Fried Rice with day-old rice, or simmered into a Chicken Congee if you also made stock. If you have a decent pile left, a Chicken Ham and Leek Pie will stretch it across another dinner for four.

A couple of safety habits: get the cooked meat into the fridge within two hours of carving, use it within three days, and only reheat it once, until piping hot all the way through. Done this way, a single bird becomes a roast dinner, a couple of lunches, a soup and a pot of stock, with nothing thrown away except the picked-clean bones.