Herb-Butter Chicken
If you’re like me, you’ll make this recipe once and never look at it again—you’ll know the template by heart and be able to build variations on it forever after. The basics are simple: herb-speckled butter slipped under the skin of a chicken that’s roasted at high heat in a Dutch oven. I’ve given you a recipe for the butter, which both moistens and flavors the chicken, but nothing about it is sacred. I use a mix of herbs, trying to include some rosemary, tarragon (so good with chicken), and dill, along with the parsley, cilantro, and basil that are usually in my fridge, but the next time you make the chicken, you could go Asian, with ginger, garlic, and lemongrass, or Mediterranean, with sumac, lemon, za’atar, and thyme.Here are my favorite parts of the recipe: the hands-off roasting (the butter bastes the bird so that you don’t have to); the economy of using all the herb and scallion trimmings, as well as the zested-and-squeezed lemon, to flavor the chicken from the inside; the bread that sits under the chicken and soaks up all the drippings (ever since I learned this trick, I’ve roasted a piece or two of bread under a chicken); the pan juices that come along with the roast; and the fact that you get twice as much flavored butter as you need, so you’re ahead on the next chicken or whenever you want to doll up rice or steamed vegetables.
