From Factory-Farmed Chicken to Easter Chicken

Out with factory-farmed chicken and a toast to Easter Chicken: a genuine, honest chicken with flavor. Fortunately, as a home cook, you have more and more choice when it comes to high-quality chicken. Not only at the supermarket or poultry shop, but nowadays you can also go online for an excellent heritage-breed chicken that has enjoyed a happy, free-range life.  

Traditionally, during Easter I like to prepare a whole chicken – or two or three, if necessary – for friends and family. There is little to beat a juicy, perfectly roasted chicken with a golden-brown crispy crust. I generously rub herb butter under the skin so that the chicken meat melts in your mouth. I also baste the chicken regularly while roasting for an extra crispy result. I serve it with floury potatoes with rosemary and garlic from the same roasting pan; that way, they soak up all those delicious roasting juices. In short: a simple but effective recipe.

Irish Redbro chicken

The key lies not only in the preparation, but also in the quality of the chicken. In my search for the perfect chicken for the approaching Easter holidays, I ended up at new chick on the block Paaskip.com. Here you can order delicious Irish Redbro chickens. Previously, they also launched Christmas Chicken, to which FavorFlav favorite Peter Lute lent his name with honor.

Slow grown

What makes this chicken special is that it is a slow-growing breed, which unmistakably benefits the quality of the meat. A tasty chicken has a bit of bite, and it gets that through sufficient exercise and plenty of time to grow at a leisurely pace. The Easter chickens grow by around 39 grams every day. That makes Easter Chicken a genuine slow grown chicken. By comparison: the average industrial chicken grows by at least fifty grams a day. In a record time of approximately 42 days, such a factory-farmed chicken grows to a slaughter weight of more than two kilos – as I discovered for my book Handbook for the Perfect Chicken. You can taste the difference. Quite apart from animal welfare, these fast-growing birds are also a crime against good taste: a bodybuilder chicken like that has barely any flavor when compared with a real chicken.

A fine specimen

To cut a long story short: breed, diet and room to move are all important indicators of a chicken’s quality. With this Easter Chicken, all of that appears to be in excellent order. A chicken that has been raised with love and care is naturally somewhat more expensive, but it is well worth the money.

And the fun part is that via Paaskip.com you can watch the chickens grow in the barn. For €14.95, you can order a fine 1.5-kilo specimen, and a few days later it will be delivered free to your home in a neat cool box. Highly recommended, especially if you use it for my super-juicy oven-roasted Easter chicken.

Super-juicy oven-roasted Easter chicken from the oven

This is the way to make the perfect oven-roasted chicken. The butter and fresh herb filling gives the chicken extra flavor and keeps the meat deliciously juicy and tender. Bonus: the roasting juices baste the floury potatoes and produce an incredible gravy.

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180 °C. Finely chop the herbs and mix them into the softened butter. To apply the butter filling, loosen the skin from the meat; do this with your fingers or by sliding a spoon, rounded side facing up, underneath the skin. Work carefully so that the skin does not tear. Use your fingers to spread the butter underneath the skin, including around the drumsticks.

2. Toss the potatoes with the olive oil in a roasting pan until they are coated all over. Crush the garlic cloves and distribute them among the potatoes. Cut the lemon into wedges and set aside.

3. Cover the chicken breast with double-folded aluminum foil, leaving the drumsticks uncovered. Place the chicken on top of the potatoes. Put the roasting pan in the center of the oven and roast the chicken until cooked through, approximately 60 minutes. Remove the aluminum foil after 20 minutes. Turn the potatoes halfway through the cooking time.

4. Check the temperature of the breast and drumsticks with a meat thermometer. At 62 °C (breast) and 72 °C (thickest part of the drumstick), the chicken is perfectly cooked. Remove the roasting pan from the oven and let the chicken rest under aluminum foil for approximately 15 minutes. Serve with the lemon wedges.