Roast chicken with garlic, sage, lemon and sweet potato

Sunday night is traditionally a roast night. I suppose because, in a perfect world, you have a whole day to get things ready and think about it. Roast, I find, needs a fair bit of head space for some reason. I think because I associate it with family dinners and the like, back when I was a kid. Funny thing is, roast chicken is probably the easiest and cheapest roast to make, and it is very hard to ruin. It boils down to a) the quality of the chicken, b) what you put in and on it, and c) how long you cook it for. It is very easy to find good chicken marinades and bastes for roast, and chicken can take a wide variety of flavours very happily, from subtle flavours like lemon and sage, to rich ones like prosciutto and butter. This particular kind roast tends on the subtle side, where the flavour of the chicken is lifted up and supported by the activity of the marinade and the stuffing, rather than the other way around (which is fine, by the way!).

So, you take a chicken, a lemon (you can also use an orange, that is really nice - much sweeter), four cloves of garlic, and four heads of garlic (for four people, use one garlic head per person) some sea salt, olive oil and sage. The original recipe called for thyme, but I couldn't find any at the shops and the one we had in the garden had died. Preheat the oven to 190/200C. Then, clean the chicken. Depending on how it was when you got it, this could involve simply washing it inside and out with water, then pat drying, to a full gutting. I've never done that so I can't help you there. But good luck.

Cut the lemon in half. Juice half in a bowl. Add a teaspoon of salt, two and a half table spoons of olive oil, the crushed four cloves of garlic, and add a bit of pepper to season. This is the baste (right). Place the chicken on a roasting rack in a baking tray, and liberally smear the baste all over the chicken, inside and out.

Next, stuff it. Open it up a bit, and jam the other (non-juiced) half into the cavity, and then the sage leaves. You can rip them up a bit if you like but I don't think it matters. Now close up the cavity. There is a complicated way of tying up chickens with string, but all I did was 'sew' it up with a bamboo skewer.

Once this is done, arrange the chicken non-breast side down (right). Or breast side up, whichever you prefer. Drizzle a bit more olive oil over it, and salt and pepper to season. Pop it in the oven for fifteen minutes.

While it is cooking, cut up some sweet potato into centimetre-wide slices. Put them in a bowl, pour some olive oil over them and make sure they are all covered. Grab the garlic heads, and cut the tops (where the stalk would come out) off, taking with it the tips of as many cloves as you can. Once the chicken has finished its first 15, take it out, and slip the sweet potato slices under the roasting rack into the chicken baste at the bottom. Turn the chicken over. Put the garlic heads onto the rack next to the chicken, and drizzle some oil over them. Put the chicken back into the over for another 45 minutes, or until the juices run clear. To test this, poke the chicken deeply in different places with a skewer, then push the meat next to the hole to squeeze out the juices. Make sure you test in the joint between the drumstick and the body, because down there is where it won't be cooked thoroughly.

When it is done, it will look something like this:
The chicken should be nicely golden, the garlic squishy, and the potato slightly caramelised around the edges. Leave the whole thing to rest for 10 minutes. This is important, because it lets the muscle fibres in the flesh to 'relax' back and soak the juices up. If you cut the meat just as it is out of the oven in the first place it will be too hot, and in the second all the juice will run out with the knife, into the pan, and not stay in the meat where it is useful.

Result
This was a really, really nice chicken. It was fully cooked all the way through, really tender, and it was chicken out front, and baste behind. It probably could have been cooked for longer to let the skin crisp up a bit, but that is a minor quibble. The garlic was really interesting - very sweet, almost translucent, and it just melted. It was possible to just spread it over bread like jam. For the breath-conscious, don't worry - roasted garlic does not stay on your breath like fresh garlic. It is a completely different flavour and expereience. For me, though, the best part was the sweet potato. This had just soaked up all the lovely flavours of the chicken, the baste, and the garlicky oil, and were ever so slightly crispy. My wife made some packet gravy for it, which was a really nice addition, but you could probably skip it if you wanted to or didn't have the fixings. Plus, there was enough left over for lunches tomorrow.

One disappointment was that I couldn't taste the sage at all. I think it suffered from being in the cavity. I had expected it to mingle with the lemon juice but it just didn't. My wife said it was there though, so I have to blame my lack of subtlety for that.