Woodfired Roast Chicken with Hasselback Potatoes
Can anything beat Woodfired Roast Chicken with Hasselback Potatoes?? Roast chicken is my all time favourite dinner and to have it cooked in the woodfired oven just takes it to another level. The meat stays deliciously moist, the skin takes on a great colour, a fab crispiness and a hint of smokiness and the potatoes are just awesome. You may think it’s a bit of a faff making hasselback potatoes for everyone but believe us, once you’ve tried and tasted them, there is no going back; amazing crunchy outside, meltingly soft inside.
We roast chickens on our Mastering your Woodfired Oven course here at the cooking school and our students are converted to cooking their chickens in future in their own woodfired ovens. Just the best way to do it or gert lush as they say somewhere or other….
Here’s how we rustle up our woodfired roast chicken with hasselback potatoes –
Woodfired Roast Chicken with Hasselback Potatoes – Ingredients
1 medium chicken – about 1.5kg
1 lemon, cut in half
5tbsp olive oil
8 medium floury potatoes, all roughly the same size (we used Maris Piper)
Leaves from a few sprigs fresh thyme
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
90g butter
1 Savoy Cabbage, thinly sliced
150ml dry white wine
30g plain flour
600ml chicken stock
Salt and pepper
2 hickory chunks, cut down into smaller pieces and soaked in water for an hour
Woodfired Roast Chicken with Hasselback Potatoes – Method
- Rub half the oil into the chicken and season well with salt and peper. Put the lemon halves inside the carcass. Put the chicken in a roasting tin and put the tin in the woodfired oven. Keep the door slightly ajar so the smoke can drift over the chicken and escape. you don’t want the door to be tight shut or the meat will become acrid.
- Drain the hickory chunks and put them on the embers of the fire using a peel to place them there. Check the chicken’s not browning too quickly after 10-15 minutes – if it is, cover the chicken with some foil.
- Put 2 chopsticks on a chopping board and put one of the potatoes on top of the chopsticks. Cut through the potato until your knife hits the chopsticks and carry on making cuts right along the potato, about 3-4 mm apart, making sure you don’t cut all the way through. Do this with all the other potatoes and put them in a pan that will fit them all in a single layer.
- Melt the butter and add the garlic and thyme. Brush the butter all over the potatoes. Put the pan of the potatoes in the woodfired oven with the chicken.
- After about 60 minutes, test the temperature of the chicken with a probe thermometer – it should be around 75C. If your chicken isn’t ready yet, just put it back in the oven and close the door.
Woodfired Roast Chicken and Hasselback Potatoes – Finishing Up
- Once the potatoes are tender (test them with a small pointy knife), keep them warm until you’re ready to eat. They will be super crunchy on the outside and through all those cuts you made and super soft on the inside.
- Towards the end of the chicken’s cooking time, toss the cabbage in the rest of the oil and add a little salt and pepper with the wine. Put it in a pan and wilt the cabbage in the heat of the oven.
- Drain any juices from the chicken and leave the chicken to rest covered with foil and a clean tea towel.
- Stir the flour into the roasting tin that the chicken was cooked in and season well. Put the tin in the oven for a minute or so to start cooking the flour. Stir in the chicken stock and any juices from the cooked chicken and put the tin back in the oven again, stirring the gravy from time to time. Pour the cooked gravy into a saucepan and keep it warm in the oven.
- Once the chicken has rested for about 15 minutes, carve it up and serve with the hasselback potatoes, wilted Savoy cabbage and gravy.
Do let us know how you get on and follow what we did on our youtube video here
See you next week for more Woodfired Weekly!
Holly and David