Slow Cooker Roast Chicken (Whole Chicken)
There are various advantages of cooking a chicken this way: it results in delicious, moist meat; there’s no crispy skin to tempt you; and once it’s in the pot, you can go off and do something else for a few hours. Now, if that ‘thing’ you do happens to be a trip to the gym, you might want to double your serving size – which will give you around 450 calories. Otherwise, you’ll get about nine portions from this recipe, each containing around 220 calories.
Ingredients
Instructions
10 steps
Prepare the onions and garlic
Melt the ghee in a large cast iron skillet over medium heat. Sauté the onions and garlic until they’re softened and lightly browned (approx. 8 – 10 mins)
Add the tomato paste and stir
Season the vegetables with salt and pepper to taste
Then, deglaze the pan with the wine and/or chicken stock, and transfer everything to your slow cooker
‘Dry off’ the bird and season it well — inside and out — with salt, pepper, and your chosen seasoning
Place the chicken breast-side down in the slow cooker, put on the cover, and set it to cook on low for 4.5 hours
When the chicken has finished cooking, take it out of the slow cooker and let it rest for 20 minutes
Skim the fat off the braising sauce and check for seasoning, then blend it with a handheld blender to make a delicious gravy
Tear the chicken up with your hands and serve it with the gravy and your favourite vegetables!
Notes: Serving Suggestions
- If you like your chicken moist, using a slow cooker is a great way of getting what you want! But resist the temptation to cook the chicken for longer than 6 hours on low, or it’ll lose its moistness.
- Save the gravy if there’s too much – it’s delicious and goes with lots of things! It’ll keep for a couple of days, so either use it quickly or freeze it and use it in a future dish, or use it to make a soup stock.
- Serve your chicken with green vegetables, such as spinach, broccoli or kale, to bring some extra nutrition to your dinner and make it more filling, without adding calories
Photos
Notes: Ingredients
Chicken
- Kosher is particularly nice to use. Kosher standards require all chickens to go through a salt brine bath before being eaten, which takes away any bitterness and keeps the meat moist and tender.
Kosher salt
- Also known as ‘Koshering salt’ outside of the US – is a variety of edible salt with a much larger grain size than some common table salt.
- Like common table salt, kosher salt consists mainly of the chemical compound sodium chloride.
- Unlike some common table salt, kosher salt typically contains no added iodine.
- But nearly all salt is kosher, including ordinary table salt – the term “kosher salt” simply refers to it being used to make meats kosher by removing surface blood (which is in accordance with the guidelines for kosher foods as written in the Torah)
Ghee
- Ghee is a class of clarified butter that originated in ancient India and is commonly used in South Asian, Iranian and Arabic cuisines.
- Ghee is prepared by simmering butter – the butter separates into three layers: water, milk solid and butter fat (ghee). The water evaporates, the milk solids sink to the bottom, and the butter fat is removed and used as ghee – but not until the milk solids have browned slightly, giving the ghee a slightly nutty flavour.
- The texture, colour, and taste of ghee depend on the quality of the butter, source of the milk used in the process and the duration of the boiling.
- Like any clarified butter, ghee is composed almost entirely of fat, 62% of which consists of saturated fats.
- A tablespoon of ghee contains 112 calories and 12.7g fat
- Ghee is solid at room temperature but can easily be melted if necessary.
- Many people prefer cooking with ghee over butter because it does not burn as easily as butter
‘Sunny Paris’ seasoning (or your favourite seasoning)
- ‘Sunny Paris’ is a particular type of seasoning produced by a company called Penzey’s
- Spices, although other companies produce similar mixtures
- Penzeys recipe – shallots, chives, green peppercorn, dill weed, basil, tarragon, chervil and bay leaf.
- Poss alternatives: Chinese 5 spice, Jamaican jerk, tandoori mix
