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I have been think­ing about shar­ing some of my favorite recipes and dishes here on my blog. I fig­ured a good place to start is with my sim­ple,  deli­cious, roasted chicken. Now, when I say sim­ple, I mean simple.

Ingre­di­ents

• 4–5 pound whole chicken (prefer­ably free-range, organic)
• Extra vir­gin olive oil
• Kosher salt

Prepra­tion

Pre-heat your oven to 425° (If you’re using a con­vec­tion oven, either use 400° or adjust your cook­ing time by about 5–10 minutes).

Remove the chicken from the pack­ag­ing. Feel free to cook, or use, the innards. I don’t care for them. Don’t rinse the chicken. Instead, just pat it dry with paper tow­els. Place the chicken in a flat dish, plate, or on a cut­ting board. Lather  the chicken with the olive oil, and then gen­er­ously sprin­kle the Kosher salt all over the sur­face of the bird (both sides).

Place the chicken on a roast­ing rack and put it on a sheet pan. If you have a roast­ing rack, take some alu­minum foil and crum­ple it up and place it in a sheet pan to serve as the rack. The crum­pled foil will allow the oil to run away from the chicken so that the skin will get crispy all around. Another thing to try is to take some bread, French bread or day-old bread is great. Cre­ate a layer of the bread in the bot­tom of the sheet pan and put the chicken on top. You can use the crispy bread for cou­tons if you make a salad. Truss the legs. For what­ever rea­son, I have a bunch of pipe clean­ers in my pantry. I soak the the pipe cleaner in oil so that it won’t burn in the oven.

Place the chicken in the oven for  and hour and 15 min­utes. Be advised that the chicken will smoke because of the oil. You might want to keep the over­head fan run­ning and a win­dow cracked. Don’t bother the chicken while it’s cook­ing in the oven. Just let it do its thing. Once the time is up, remove the chicken from the oven and let stand for about 10 minutes.

That’s it. The results are the same every time.

This is a change from how I used to roast chick­ens, which was at a lower tem­per­a­ture for a longer time. I also used to stuff my chicken with lemons and gar­lic or laven­der. (I actu­ally sprin­kled a lit­tle laven­der on this chicken). This recipe will pro­duce a juicy chicken with crispy skin, because of the olive oil and salt. Nat­u­rally, you should feel free to play around with spices and sea­son­ings that you like. If you use herbs, try tuck­ing them between the skin and the meat.

Enjoy!