How a Master French Chef Makes Roast Chicken at Home

Roasted chicken is so special to me

because it's something that we would eat every Sunday.

Growing up,

every French family, [speaks in foreign language]

Which means roasted chicken on Sunday.

It just reminds me of going to the market with my dad

and just buying everything and coming home

and doing this very simple dish but that is full of flavor.

We're making the ultimate French roasted chicken,

and we're starting with a compound butter.

A compound butter is a butter that we flavor.

It could be anything.

It could be garlic, it could be parsley,

it could be extremely complicated or very simple.

So the compound butter is super important

because this is what's gonna really base the chicken

and give the flavor.

A bit of Espelette pepper, which I love.

Comes from the best country.

Extremely delicious.

Not too spicy, very fragrant.

I just love the color also it brings,

it gives this really nice golden color to the chicken,

which is just for me like so beautiful.

We need to add some parsley. Chopped.

The idea is to really just pick the leaves, not the stems.

We'll use the stems though to put inside the chicken.

So what you want is to roughly chop.

Into the butter.

Right now, what we need to add:

lemon zest for this very bright, acidic taste

that's gonna give a nice aroma.

I also am someone

that puts lemon juice in my chicken at the end.

I know this is controversial. Not every family does that.

My mom would put lemon on everything.

In the meantime, I'm just gonna let the butter outside.

It's very important because you want the butter

first of all to be easily spreadable.

And also, everything that you put in the fridge

kind of neutralizes taste.

And right now, we're leaving at room temperature.

Everything is developing

and you're gonna have an amazing aroma at the end.

Okay, garlic, one of the best ingredients in the world.

So confit garlic is cooking garlic in some sort of fat.

It could be anything.

They can work with beef tallow with butter,

with anything that will encapsulate the moisture

and slow cook.

Garlic in a pan.

Some olive oil or any oil

or anything you have in your house.

And the idea is to just cover the garlic.

Also, do not throw the oil after.

It's delicious in vinaigrettes

and also just reusing to cook a steak

to cook anything that you want.

Vegetables, it will just give this amazing garlic aroma

without actually using garlic.

Put it on medium, medium high heat.

This will give us room to cook it quite fast

without burning.

The garlic looks amazing.

What you're looking for is just a light color.

You don't want it too dark

just because it's gonna be bitter.

So this is perfect.

And I'm just gonna add probably like three to four cloves

to my butter.

And here I'm just gonna mush it with my spoon. Very easy.

So this is what we're looking for in terms of consistency.

Something that is spoonable,

that is easy, that is nice and aromatic.

I could smell all the flavors.

Let's put it to the side and get the chicken going.

This chicken has been drying for a few days.

It helps with obviously the moisture of the skin.

Because it's dry, it's gonna absorb everything that is wet,

that's gonna come on top

and it will just be a better vessel for the compound butter.

So this chicken obviously looks extremely different

from what you see in grocery stores.

Even even butchers, to be fair.

Like it's golden chicken from Pennsylvania, very fatty.

It's also a chicken that you can see here is quite muscular,

and it will develop the flavor and just give something that

is reminiscent to what we get in France.

Obviously if you cannot find this chicken,

the best thing you can do is go to a butcher.

First of all, see if they have different chickens.

If they do,

ask for maybe the one that stayed outside the longest,

the one that has maybe a bit more fat.

The fresher the chicken,

the more you're gonna be able to dry-age it in your fridge.

I keep the feet in the chicken

just because I like the look of it.

I think it's nice, it looks a bit dramatic.

But also because when it crisps out in the oven,

it's so delicious.

First thing though is to salt the inside of the chicken.

It's kind of like brining your poultry.

I'm not gonna salt the exterior part

just because I already put a lot of salt

in the compound butter.

We're gonna add all the aromatics

before trussing the chicken.

So we're going very simple.

A big amount of thyme.

Two bay leaves.

And then all the parsley stalks that I used.

The idea is to reuse it.

We need to truss it.

This is really what's going to give you

a very homogenous cooking.

Because everything is gonna be tied together,

and it's gonna make sure that the white part

is gonna cook as much as the thighs

and not have this very uneven chicken cooking.

You just need some butcher's twine.

So you want something that the twine to go under

the two wings.

Basically like that.

You wanna feel like it's holding.

And then you're gonna do a cross like that.

This cross needs to go in between each legs.

And then you're gonna go under here, under the legs,

and tie.

Very simple. This is really the basic trussing technique.

So the idea here is now is to put the butter.

We're focusing on the breast.

It's the part that gets dry the fastest

when you're roasting.

And then you wanna put a bit on each thigh.

And also, let's not forget that the chicken is gonna drip,

it's gonna go on the sides.

So it doesn't need to be perfect.

One stick of butter is perfect for one chicken.

If you wanna be even more French, you can put two

but I think that's enough.

I like to roast the chicken dry first with the vegetables

just because it's gonna crisp up the skin.

It's also gonna crisp up the potatoes and the onions.

And then I add moisture to kind of like have something

that is really nice and cooked through.

We're gonna take a roasting tray.

What I like about these trays is this thing.

This will separate the chicken

from literally touching the bottom of the pan.

And it's going to ensure that the bottom part,

because it's not in contact directly with the tray,

it's not gonna get soggy.

So you can get a really crispy chicken everywhere.

Okay, chicken is done.

It's hanging out behind me.

And now, it's time to cut some veg and add it to the pan.

This is really the three basic ingredients

that you'll find in most roast chicken all over France.

The potato really adds this nourishing,

you know, soaking up all the juices,

the onion when it's like nice and caramelized

is just so good and brings the sweetness.

And the carrot, I love just how carrots get

when they're roasted for so long,

kind of like nearly a bit chewy.

We're gonna go very easy on these veg.

The idea is not even to peel them.

I think that the peel in every vegetable is delicious,

it's nutritious, it's also where you find all the vitamins.

We're gonna prep the carrots first.

We're gonna take the top off.

I like to keep a bit of the green.

I think visually, it's nice.

And I just take the tip off. Just like that.

And then we're gonna rinse them.

Those stems can work for a few things.

I like to use them in like a scrap broth,

that's what I call it.

So I would use the outside of the onion,

the stems of the carrots.

You could use pretty much anything,

and it's a great way to kind of utilize all the scraps.

I like to put them all in the freezer

and at the end of the week

you have the scraps from a whole week

and then you can start doing something with it.

You wanna quickly rinse all your veg.

If you want a quick chicken,

you need to cut your veg a bit smaller

because that's how they're gonna be cooked through.

And if you're looking for something

like a chicken that's cooked for two and a half hours,

honestly I would even leave some like potatoes whole.

Because they're gonna roast for so long.

You wanna kind of make sure

that the vegetable is cooked through

but not completely disintegrated in the recipe.

Since I'm roasting for roughly like an hour and 20 minutes,

that's what I'm looking for.

Roughly this size. See?

I like the bias just because visually it's also nicer.

I think everything that's not square

just encapsulates better.

Like the sauces, it grabs flavor.

Put the veg a bit everywhere.

It's really not important to be precise here.

Here we're gonna start salting.

And now, we're gonna dice some onions.

When you're cooking, especially in a small space,

you always try and adapt

and make sure that you work methodically

to make sure that the kitchen is not a mess.

So I like to chop things.

As soon as I don't have space, I put it in the pan,

and then I clean up and then I dice again.

Just to make sure it doesn't get overwhelming.

And then you're not left with like

a bunch of mess to clean after lunch.

I'm just gonna salt again a last layer for the onion on top.

The garlic oil is gonna give us so much flavor

for all the veg.

And it's just like, make sure we don't waste anything.

So we're gonna put the chicken in the oven

for roughly 45 minutes,

depending again on your oven.

I like to put full fan, start at 350.

And maybe after 30 minutes, bump it up to 380 Fahrenheit

for another 10 to 15

just to make sure we have a nice golden color.

The chicken has been roasting for roughly like 45 minutes,

so we're halfway there.

The idea now is to kind of deglaze the pan,

bring a bit of moisture

to make sure that the chicken doesn't dry up.

We can see that the juice,

there's some dripping in the bottom,

some veg are getting caramelized.

What you're looking here is to add moisture.

So we're gonna add moisture with a bit of white wine

and some chicken stock.

The reason we put white wine in roasted chicken

is really to bring acidity balance,

have a bit of also complexity.

Kind of deglaze the bottom of the pan.

Make sure that everything kind of unstick to the bottom.

With all the aromatics and the veg

that scream more like a bright recipe,

I feel like white wine makes more sense.

But if I was doing something made with sunchoke,

with parsnip, something a bit more wintery,

maybe I'd lean towards red wine.

I like to get chicken stock from the butchers.

I feel like it has way more collagen

than the one that we find

like in the shelf in the supermarket.

It just brings more depth.

We're gonna put it back in.

Okay, it's been an hour and like 25 minutes,

so we're ready to get the chicken outta the oven.

Let's see how it looks.

It looks very nice.

How do we know it's cooked? Very simple.

We're just gonna poke the knife in different areas.

If we get some some juice released,

it means that it's cooked.

If it's not cooked,

you're not gonna see any moisture coming out just because...

I mean, it's not cooked, it's raw.

Here on the thigh here you see a lot of moisture coming out.

The thigh is the most important

because this is also what takes the longest to cook.

So you wanna make sure that you're not carving a chicken

that it might be cooked on the breast

but the thighs are not cooked

and then you have to re-cook them separately.

In France we do everything kind of by the feel

and this is how I learned how to cook, so yeah,

just poke the chicken.

What you're looking for is to let it rest a bit.

If you cut it right now,

it's just gonna release so much moisture

that it's just not gonna be very enjoyable.

And then we're gonna create this sauce

to take all the juices that we got from the chicken.

We're gonna get all of the veg out.

And just finish the sauce with a few ingredients.

Put the pan back on the heat.

High heat. You really wanna go fast on this.

You wanna reduce,

you just wanna add maybe a bit of Espelette, lemon juice,

demi-glace.

And that's pretty much it.

Black pepper.

Demi-glace is basically just a reduction

of the chicken bones with red wine and some stock.

And this kind of brings this restaurant quality sauce

that is quite hard to replicate at home.

I might wanna add just a cube of butter.

Just to make sure it's nice.

Silky.

Kind of like monter au sauce,

which means like incorporating the butter with the whisk

without a whisk here.

This is luxury right here.

So good.

Very good. Happy.

Carving a chicken, everybody has different ways of doing it.

What I like to do is start obviously by the thigh.

In the thigh,

you're looking to break a muscle that's roughly here.

So you're gonna kind of like pull it towards you.

You know, it's gonna slip.

So just use a clean towel.

You wanna make sure you take the oyster,

which in France we call it the sot-l'y-laisse.

The sot-l'y-laisse

is known to be like the best part of the chicken.

Think it's also like an old myth,

like something that people said years ago,

and it kind of sticks.

And so everybody's like raving about this part.

I don't necessarily think it's the best part.

I think it's extremely moist and tender.

You can see that it doesn't fall apart

because you see it's a chicken that ran.

And there is some muscle that you don't find other chickens.

We're gonna go straight into the breast.

So the idea here is to really separate both.

You just like go for it, you know?

You kind of like break it and it'll work.

So here, the breast,

you wanna make sure you're taking everything.

Because sometimes when it's hot and you're carving,

you're kind of like in a rush

and you don't wanna take too long

and you kind of miss like the half of the breast.

It's like stuck to the bone.

So here, I'm taking my time.

I'm a chiropractor,

I already dislocated the whole thing.

I barely did any knife work.

And we're just gonna let it like this

and then we're gonna kind of like divide it

to make sure everybody has a nice piece.

Everything that's on this cutting board,

you do not wanna throw it away.

You wanna kind of like scrape everything

and get everything back in your sauce.

And now, we're gonna kind of like divide

to make sure everybody has an nice piece.

So my favorite piece in the chicken is the white part.

The breast.

I feel like it's controversial.

People say it's like bland, but I kind of like it.

I'm cutting on the skin side down

to make sure you have the weight of the knife.

Because sometimes when you cut like that,

especially if you knife is not sharp,

you're gonna tear the skin apart

before you're even cutting the meat.

And it's funny,

there was like a touch of pink when I carved it.

And just by the time it rests, it's like perfectly cooked.

Now, it's time to plate.

So I like to put some vegetables in the bottom first

just so it kind of like takes all the juices.

We're gonna take each piece of meat

and season it on the inside.

Just make sure you have salt everywhere.

If you're cooking on Sundays,

usually you're cooking for like family, loved ones.

Get some moment of taking care of people.

So make it nice.

It doesn't need to be crazy, crazy in terms of presentation.

But make sure you take your time

and put the chicken in a nice way

and make sure that you show that you love

the ones you cook for.

Then we're just gonna finish with the sauce.

Putting all the juices back in the sauce.

Okay, this is [speaks in foreign language]

which means the roasted chicken on Sunday.

It literally takes me back home.

A lot of memories growing up.

The oyster is as good as ever.

The quality of the chicken really shines.

There's so much chicken flavor

that you don't feel like in a lot of roast chicken.

It's exactly what I wanna eat on Sunday.

[bright music]