Crispy baked chicken recipe with potatoes

Crispy baked chicken with potatoes: a classic recipe, traditionally associated with Sunday lunches or important events such as Christmas, for example. In this article, I wanna leave you tips and tricks to prepare a crispy baked chicken with potatoes and the recipe to make it at home, plus a tasty variant that you can have fun preparing.

Despite being an easy recipe, in fact, it hides not a few pitfalls and often it becomes difficult to reach the perfect crunchiness. It is therefore always necessary to find a balance between the outside and the inside cooking of the chicken: if the chicken is overcooked on the outside, it may get dry inside but vice versa, if it is not cooked and not very crispy on the outside, it could be raw inside.

How to solve this problem to prepare a crispy baked chicken with potatoes like our grandmothers used to make? We must pay attention to the following things and follow a few but necessary rules:

• Do not remove the skin from the chicken: even if we are tempted to do it, e.g if we follow a low-fat diet, we must not fall into temptation. The skin helps to protect the inside of the chicken when cooked and when it is cooked and crispy, it is also one of the best parts of a roast chicken;
• The chicken should always be drizzled with extra virgin olive oil before being placed in the oven: in fact, despite the release of fat, this alone can not create a balance between the outside and the inside and should be helped with other fat, which will help the homogeneous cooking;
• In place of oil, for an even better result and an even tastier chicken, you can use lard or, if you want to cook with natural oils and a very high smoke point, with coconut oil taking into account that the taste given by this type of agents could be quite peculiar and recognizable;
• As the chicken cooks in the oven, take it out with the whole pan and sprinkle with the cooking fat. This will ensure that the cooking is homogeneous, that the chicken becomes crispy on the outside and at the same time is juicy inside. For this operation, you can also use white wine but the risk is that being too liquid and cold, it will stop the browning of the meat;
• To ensure that the final part of the wings does not burn (risking to change the taste of the whole chicken), wrap it in foil. In this way it will cook without burning and will not alter the taste of the meat;

How long does it take to cook a whole chicken?

In principle (but it depends on the oven used!) you must always calculate 60 minutes of cooking for each kg of meat, in a static oven at 200°C/392°F.

How to season a whole chicken?

You can use rosemary, laurel, paprika, lemon, oranges, apples and basically explore possibility based on your taste!

There is no roast chicken without baked potatoes but we often make mistakes in cooking potatoes. That’s why to get perfect baked potatoes (or tending to perfection) you can follow these tips:

• Preferably choose yellow potatoes, less floury and simpler to bake;
• Avoid cooking the potatoes together with the chicken: the cooking times are different and the grease of the chicken risks literally soaking the potatoes, which will soften instead of becoming crispy;
• The potatoes should be cut more or less the same size so as to standardize cooking times;
• Never place the superimposed potatoes in the pan: they must have the necessary space to cook uniformly and must not be too tight otherwise they will tend to soften and fill with oil. Not to mention that when you turn them around, if they are all too close they will break.

This is the method that I follow for the preparation of baked potatoes:

• Cut the potatoes and soak them in cold water for 30 minutes, so as to ensure that the starch contained in them comes out;
• Put the potatoes in a pot of cold water and bring to a boil, without seasoning, then leave to cook for about 20 minutes (depending on the size of the potatoes: the smaller they are, the less time you need. Remember to check they do not flake). In this way the potatoes will soften and will be ready to be cooked in the oven;
• Put some oil in a pan and heat it in an already lit oven. Once the oil is hot, add the garlic and the previously boiled potatoes. At this point, just cook your potatoes for an hour and a half having the foresight to turn them every 30 minutes and add the rosemary almost at the end of cooking.

Let’s move to the classic recipe to prepare an amazing crispy baked chicken with potatoes, followed by a video recipe, stuffed chicken wrapped with bacon, a variation to try:

Now that you have the recipe, the tips and tricks to prepare this crispy baked chicken with potatoes, go wild and prepare also this delicious chicken stuffed with mushrooms and wrapped with bacon, ideal to bring to the table as a variant of the classic chicken and potatoes: