The recipe everything else is measured against. Learn it properly and you have the stock, the sandwiches and the soup as well.
Pat the bird dry and rub the salt over every surface, inside the cavity as well. Set it on a rack over a plate and leave it uncovered in the fridge overnight — twenty-four hours if you can manage it.
This is a dry brine, and it is the single largest improvement available to a roast chicken. Why it works, and why wet brining does not →
Forty minutes on the counter before it goes in the oven. A fridge-cold bird cooks unevenly — the outside is done long before the inside catches up, and that gap is where dry breast meat comes from.
200 °C, or 180 °C in a fan oven, and give it a full fifteen minutes after it says it has reached temperature. Most ovens lie.
Lemon halves, bay and garlic into the cavity. Butter over the breast and legs, then plenty of black pepper. No more salt — it went on yesterday.
Tie the legs together loosely with string. This is not about neatness: it slows the thighs down slightly so they finish closer to when the breast does.
Lay the onion slices in the tin and sit the bird on them, breast up. They keep the base off the metal, they stop the fat catching, and they end up in the gravy.
Twenty minutes at 200 °C, then down to 180 °C for another fifty to sixty. Do not open the door in the first half hour.
Push a thermometer into the thickest part of the thigh, avoiding bone. You want 72 °C. If you have no thermometer, the leg should move freely in its socket and the juices from the thigh should run clear.
A 1.6 kg bird usually lands at seventy to eighty minutes of total oven time. Full table by weight →
Out of the tin, onto a warm plate, loosely tented. Twenty minutes is not optional and it is not a suggestion about temperature — it is what lets you carve the thing without losing half of it to the board.
The internal temperature will still climb three or four degrees while it sits. What is actually happening →
Legs off first, then the breasts down either side of the keel in one piece each, then slice. The oysters — two thumb-sized pieces of dark meat in hollows on the underside of the back — are the best of the bird and the cook's to keep.
Everything left is stock. Put the frame in the fridge, not the bin. Stock from the carcass →
Two causes, and it is almost always the first. The bird went into the oven wet — either it was not dried and salted the day before, or it was covered in the fridge and the surface never lost its moisture. Skin cannot brown until the water on it has boiled off, and while that is happening the oven is only steaming it.
The other cause is a cold start. If the oven had not properly come up to 200 °C, the bird spent its first twenty minutes warming up rather than browning, and it never catches up.