Outstanding roast chicken starts with the best, freshest roasting chickens you can get. Until I raised my own chickens for the freezer, I never knew what a really good chicken tasted like. Naturally grown chickens are totally different from the mass-produced kind in taste, texture, and health. If you can't raise your own, buy chickens which have been naturally grown, out in the sunshine with organic feed. If more people choose to buy the good stuff, more people will sell the good stuff at a reasonable price.
Chicken bought ready-made in the mass-produced marketplace is usually heavily salted. Salt is very cheap flavor. When you make something at home, you can make it much healthier by cutting down on the salt and adding other spices for flavor. This is my favorite spice mix for chicken. Save the rest of the spices for next time. It works very well with fish too!
Lemon pepper spice mix (makes enough for 5 or 6 chickens or a ton of chicken wings):
2 tbsp Simply Organic lemon pepper (lemon peel, black pepper, sea salt, cane sugar, garlic onion, thyme, silicon dioxide for anticaking)
2 tbsp lemon peel
2 tsp salt
2 tsp garlic powder
2 tsp onion powder
1. Mix all the spices into a screw top jar. Shake it up.
2. Pour into a 1.5 to 2 oz spice jar with a shaker top.
To make the chicken:
1. Clean and rinse a roasting chicken.
2. Sprinkle chicken with the spice mix, inside and out. For the engineers who must know exactly how much to sprinkle on, it is about one tablespoon of the above mixture.
3. Bake breast up at 350 degrees for about 1 1/2 hours, uncovered, or until the breast skin is golden brown and the chicken is done.
Optional-- baste the chicken several times with the juices at the bottom of the pan during baking.
Click here for a Chicken Salad recipe to use the leftovers. A five-pound chicken makes about 5 cups of chopped up chicken.
