terrible photo of a perfect chicken in the early 1900s wagner dutch oven i found at the dump!!!!

Roast Chicken w/ Tarragon Pan Sauce
makes uhhhh 1 whole roast chicken. recipe adapted from cooks illustrated.

3-4lb chicken, ideally from a local farmer, or organic and certified humane if from the grocer
Fine salt
Dutch oven

The morning of the day you plan to roast the chicken, take it out of the fridge, unwrap it, and give it a good rinse inside and out. Pat dry and place on a plate or shallow bowl (anything with a lip) and salt liberally (like, really). Put the salted chicken back in the fridge until you’re ready to cook it. This whole process dries the skin out to get it as crispy as possible!

When you’re ready to cook, preheat the oven to 450 and place the bird in a dutch oven. You can further season the chicken here if you want; I usually just do a couple cracks of pepper and trust the liberal salting earlier to do good work. Also, high quality meat tastes very good on its own, especially a whole roast chicken! Once the oven is preheated, place the dutch oven on a bottom or middle rack and turn it so that the chicken legs are pointed towards the back of the oven.

Cook for approximately 65 minutes or until the internal temp is at least 160, juices run clear, and the leg bones easily pull away from the body. Remove the chicken from the dutch oven to a platter or board and let rest while you make the pan sauce.

chicken fat/pan drippings
a couple shallots or several garlic cloves amounting to approx ¼ cup minced
2 tbsp whole grain or stone ground or dijon mustard
1 tbsp dried tarragon or approx 3 tbsp fresh
1 cup chicken broth
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp lemon juice

If you’re not an absolute fiend for chicken fat like I am, drain all but a quarter cup of the chicken fat from the dutch oven. Otherwise, leave it all. Place the dutch oven on a burner over medium high heat. Scrape up any skin or crusty bits from the bottom of the pan as it heats up, and then add the shallots or garlic. Saute until fragrant and turning translucent, about a minute or two, then add mustard. Cook down another minute, then add the dried tarragon. If you’re using fresh tarragon, wait to add it until later. Add the chicken broth and stir well. Let the mixture simmer for several minutes, stirring regularly, until reduced by at least half. If you’re using fresh tarragon, add it now. Take off the heat and add the butter and lemon juice, stirring well or whisking if you’d like to be real technical about it. Serve with the chicken as a gravy.

In the spring and summertime, I eat this chicken over a salad of fresh crispy lettuce, spicy baby mustard greens, thinly sliced radishes, and any leftover roasted veg I have on hand (sweet potatoes are a particular favorite). This fall and winter I’ve been enjoying the chicken over a cheesy polenta with some sort of braised greens.

The sauce will solidify in the fridge and is great as a condiment on sandwiches, used like a bouillon-type seasoning for grains, or mixed up with some vinegar for a salad dressing.

a small rant on chickens

I sincerely hope you are aware of how chickens are treated on factory farms in this country. They are bred to be all breast, overfed, crammed into tiny cages, and get so fat their legs break. They’re fed grains to fatten em up and never see a lick of sunlight or taste one grub in their short little lives. USDA certifications like “cage free” and “free range” don’t actually mean anything because of the way corporate agriculture works; even “free range” chickens generally barely have access to the outdoors and are way overcrowded and overfed.
If you know chickens, you know how desperately sad this is. Not only are chickens totally delicious, they are absolutely wonderful creatures that delight in dust baths, like to catnap in the sunshine, and enjoy a very varied diet of bugs, grains, grasses, veggies, eggs, yogurt, small rodents & reptiles, etc. This last point is why the “fed an all-vegetarian diet” label claim is especially offensive to me as a fellow omnivore. Chickens are not and should not be vegetarian!! All of these label claims are total bullshit meant to make you, the consumer, feel more comfortable and less evil. This is, I repeat, bullshit. What is evil is blinding yourself from the truth of what it means to be an omnivore in a world of convenient, commercialized choices. You may never have to raise and harvest a chicken in order to consume it, but you should absolutely be aware of best practices for those things if you have any intention of being a respectful consumer and fellow earthling.
The best practice that you as a consumer can follow is to buy your meat from a local farm, most affordably in a meat share (like a CSA) or by collaborating with family/friends/neighbors to go in on a whole or half cow, pig, goat, lamb, etc if you have room to store it. I try to purchase whole chickens at the farmers market but when that option is not available to me, I buy (from the grocery store) birds with a “certified humane” label on them as this is a third party certification that I trust ensures the chicken at least got to take a dirt bath if not eat grubs to its heart’s content, and is humanely transported and slaughtered. (American Humane Certified is a similar certification.) The reason I prioritize purchasing whole chickens is because I feel that I can take on the responsibility of consuming a single individual and appropriately paying my respects— this does not feel possible with a 12 pack of chicken breasts. Furthermore, bone-in meat tastes better, it’s low-waste in terms of packaging and in that I can be sure I use all parts of the bird, and I can make bone broth!

my perfect roast chicken

a small rant on chickens