Published on 03/01/12
approx. 30minutes minutes to prepare and ca. 60 minutes minutes to cook
Serves 2-3
I have to admit, I never really cooked a whole bird before. Breast, yes. Legs, yes. But a whole bird? Never. I know it's not that difficult on the one hand. But on the other things can go wrong easily, as well. My biggest fear is dry meat.
I found this recipe on the website of German Brigitte magazine and altered it a little bit. I didn't want to go with something as elaborate as goose, duck or turkey right away. But this chicken with chestnut stuffing sounded perfect. Just a chicken, but with some fancy and wintery extras and ingredients. Wohoo!
Unfortunately it turned out a little too dry in the end. I decided to cook the chicken in a terracotta cassserole (Römertopf) instead of steaming it beforehand, as the original recipe suggested. The terracotta gets soaked in water for at least ten minutes before and keeps whatever meat is inside nice and moist. Unfortunately the chicken looked quite pale, even though the meat was already cooked. So after removing the lid I had to cook it for another 30-45 minutes in order to fry/broil the skin.
That caused some dryness in the breast sections. But hey! My first bird! Next time I will just take the lid off earlier, so that this won't happen again. And besides that, it was delicious!
If you have a tip on how to get chicken unresitibly moist, let me know. One info ahead: the minimum temperature of our gas oven is 150°C. That's as low as it gets...
The original recipe didn't use rosemary and thyme just majoran and didn't glaze the chicken with maple syrup, just melted butter. They also added honey instead of maple syrup to the pear-chestnut mix.