Roast Chicken With Crispy Drippings Croutons

I have a number of food blogs that I read on a daily basis looking for inspiration for that age old question, “What’s for dinner?”  Some of the recipes I see make me instantly drool, the gastronomic version of porn.  Elise over at Simply Recipes and Deb over at Smitten Kitchen are often guilty of making me drool .  I frequently mark recipes on their blogs to try one of these days, but I often don’t get around to it either because I never remember to buy all the ingredients or I haven’t saved up enough calories on my diet.  But early this week, Nick at The Paupered Chef posted this recipe for roast chicken with crispy drippings croutons, originally posted in The New York Times.

Boy oh boy did I drool!  AND it was a recipe calling for stuff I had in my kitchen right now! I had actually intended to make it on Tuesday when I first saw the post, but life and food requests intervened and we wound up having spaghetti with bolognese instead and other things in between.  But tonight, tonight I pulled out my roasting pan and the last half of a loaf of 9 grain bread and quickly threw it together.

I’ve never roasted a chicken this high and fast before.  I’ve always been a low and slow at 350 for 2 hours kinda girl when it comes to roasting chicken.   I couldn’t wait to try this.  Unlike Nick, I roasted mine in a traditional roasting pan rather than a small cast iron pan, and I wasn’t sure whether my croutons would turn out all toasted and lovely like his.  And instead of a head of garlic to stuff the bird, I soaked the heel of the bread in juice from my ever present jar of minced garlic and coated it with several teaspoons of minced garlic and shoved that inside the bird.  And I didn’t have a lemon to add, so I just let the garlic do the flavoring, along with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper.  The results were not quite like Nick’s.  My croutons were burned to a crisp.  In order for this to work, you HAVE to have the chicken covering and touching the croutons, so do as I say, not as I did.  The chicken, however, was delicious.  I served it with a Crane Lake Pinot Grigio ($4.44 a bottle and a deal at that).

Ingredients:

• 1 chicken
• Stale bread
• olive oil
• 4 tsps minced garlic
• kosher salt
• fresh black pepper

Directions:

1. Slice your stale bread and layer on the bottom of whatever pan you’re going to be roasting your chicken in.
2. Drizzle olive oil over the bread.  Sprinkle with salt.
3. Wash and pat dry your bird.
4. Rub lightly with olive oil.
5. Season with kosher salt and ground pepper to taste.
6. Cover the heel of the loaf or a slice with minced garlic and stuff into the bird.
7. Place bird on directly top of the layer of bread such that the bread is covered by the chicken.
8. Roast at 425 for 1 hour and 15 minutes or until juices run clear when poked with a knife.
9. Allow bird to rest for 10-15 minutes (if you can resist the wonderful smell).
10. Meanwhile, flip the bread to find the delicious, toasty goodness (because you did it like Nick did, not as I did, and your croutons turned out correctly, right?).  Try not to eat all the bread while the chicken is resting.

Printable version.