Your Best Roast Chicken

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Wishbone Roast Chicken with Herb Butter

Wishbone Roast Chicken with Herb Butter by monkeymom

This recipe with its unassuming 5 ingredients caught our eye for its use of simple techniques to achieve a flavorful bird with crisp skin. Monkeymom has thought a lot about roasting chicken: she has you tuck shallots and butter under the skin, season the bird and then let it rest in the fridge, uncovered, for 8 hours. The butter keeps the meat moist and the air-drying in the fridge ensures a crackly skin. She also came up with an ingenious way to replicate the verticle roasting in "beer can chicken," in which the chicken sits on top of a beer can while it grills. For her brilliant adaptation, she sets the chicken on the tube part of a tube pan. The verticle positioning allows the fat to drip off the bird while it cooks, and we think it does a great job of helping to cook the bird evenly, as every part is equally exposed to the oven heat. And did we mention that the finished bird is then served with an herb butter? Herb butter gets us every time. - A&M

This dish calls for a low-maintenence trip to the grocery store.

The butter should be soft but pliable.

Merrill starts making her way under the skin of the bird. Take your time -- the skin just needs to loosen from the meat and there's no hurrying it.

Merrill makes progress -- looks like she's pulling up the chicken's shirt.

After the butter, you slip in some sliced shallot.

"Merrill, you missed a spot." "Mind your own beeswax."

If you're persistent like Merrill, you can even reach all the way up to the chicken's drumsticks and slip some butter in there, too.

Merrill seasons the bird while Amanda lines up chives like only true virgos can do.

Amanda makes the herb butter, by mashing softened butter with chopped parsley, chives and salt. Monkeymom says you can use other herbs, as well. We'd think about rosemary and thyme.

Amanda dropped the butter onto a sheet of plastic wrap, then began forming it into a log.

Voila!

The bird then loses all its dignity as it's placed atop the tube pan. Then into the oven it goes and that's that!

This is what happens when you're so busy chatting that you forget you left the instant-read thermometer in the chicken. Guess the chicken is done...?

Misoyaki Roast Chicken with Shoyu Onion Sauce

Misoyaki Roast Chicken with Shoyu Onion Sauce by timWuNotWoo

Yes, timWuNotWoo shoots and edits our videos. Yes, he's a friend. And yes, he makes a mean roast chicken. In fact, we've never tasted chicken quite like this. The red miso and mirin marinade permeates the bird inside and out, giving it an addictive, sweet and savory laquered skin. The simple onion sauce, which consists of butter, onions and garlic, soy sauce, mirin, miso and more butter, is an extra bonus, perfect for drizzling over the tender meat; it is salty, so you may want to use a lower sodium soy sauce and miso to taste. Do make sure to scrape off as much of the marinade as possible before you roast the chicken -- it will just blacken otherwise. - A&M

Red miso: it's really more of a brown color.

You slowly blend the miso with mirin.

As timWunotWoo explains, it should be the consistency of a thick gravy.

The marinade goes inside the chicken as well as coating the outside -- a detail we love.

A small visitor watches Mom cut an onion into perfect dice.

Grated garlic -- it's pungent!

Is there a better smell than onions sauteing in butter? We think not.

The soy goes into the onion sauce.

Followed by more mirin.

We found that the only way to really scrape off the marinade is by using your hands.

Although timWunotWoo doesn't specify, we decided to tie the chicken's legs together for even cooking. Amanda stands at the ready with a skewer for surgery (there was a small tear in the layer of fat covering the breast).

The chicken goes in the oven, and the sauce gets finished off with more butter.