Roast Chicken with Gravy and Bread Sauce

Sunday lunch is a British institution. Every week, up and down the country, Saturday night hangovers are cured by huge roasts, good company and the inevitable post lunch snooze. It was therefore no surprise to see a whole section of Gordon Ramsay’s Great British Pub Food dedicated to roasts.

As a kid, Sunday lunch was always my favourite meal of the week. My dad, who is a decent cook, was always in charge of the kitchen on a Sunday. Even now, when I find time to head home for a weekend, his house is full of grown up children, uncles and aunties, cousins and grand children – all there for his famous roasts of beef or lamb.

Although he was never really a kitchen gadget kind of guy, we were all grateful the day dad got his first oven with a built in electric timer. Every Sunday he would get up, prepare the vegetables, put the meat into a low oven and then head down to “The Cheshire Cheese” pub for a couple of pints and a game of cards. Being the eldest of his boys I would usually get to go along. Many a time, usually when the cards were streaking particularly hot, two pints would turn into quite a few more and we would all return home later in the day to a beef joint burnt to a cinder and as chewy as old boots. Thank god for modern technology – nowadays we just have to cope with a tipsy chef!

When I’m back in London I don’t get to cook a Sunday roast all that often. The effort entailed never seems worth the while when cooking for just one or two people, especially when there is such a wide choice available from London’s pubs, who all make a virtue of their Sunday menus ( my current favourite being Sunday Lunch at the Queen’s Head & Artichoke ). Still, I was happy that my cook-through challenge would force me to stay home and cook for once.

In his recipe for roast chicken, Ramsay says “for a change, instead of roasting a large chicken to feed four, try cooking two small chickens. This way you can simply cut each chicken in half and serve each person their fair portion of white and dark meat”. As I was feeding only two of us, this was ideal – I would roast just the one small chicken and make half of the recipe. The full ingredients are shown below, being the small free-range chicken, breadcrumbs, milk, butter, onions, garlic, lemon, fresh thyme, bay leaves, cloves, black peppercorns, nutmeg, plain flour, tomato puree, white wine, and chicken stock. Quite a list!

I started off with the bread sauce. I chopped an onion in half and peeled it before studding the surface with cloves. You can see in the picture below how I used the spiky end of the cloves to drive the little spices into onion flesh.

The onion was then added to a pan along with bay leaf, thyme, peppercorns, salt and a pint of full fat milk. I brought this steadily to the boil and then set aside to infuse for an hour.

In the meantime I got on with the chicken. I freed the bird from the butcher’s strings and gently wiggled its legs to open up the cavity, making sure at this stage to season  the inside of the chicken with salt and pepper. I then halved a lemon, an onion and a whole head of garlic and used these along with bay leaf and thyme to completely stuff the bird’s cavity.

The chicken was then rubbed all over with salt and pepper and  drizzled with olive oil before being popped onto a small roasting tray and into a hot oven set at 200 C (392 F) to roast for about 45 minutes.

About 5 minutes before the chicken was due to be ready, I finished the bread sauce. The infused milk was strained into a saucepan and brought back up to temperature before adding in the breadcrumbs and a decent splodge of butter.

This was then brought up to a simmer for a couple of minutes, continually stirring until the bread sauce reached the required consistency – I like mine to be quite thick. This was then seasoned with salt, pepper and a generous grating of nutmeg before being set to one side to keep warm.

By now, the chicken was done (you can easily check this by spiking it with a sharp knife and seeing that the juices run clear). You can see how the salt rub had helped the skin go nice and crispy.

Whilst the meat rested I got on with making the gravy from the juices left over in the roasting pan. I put the pan onto a hot gas burner and added some plain flour and a small touch of tomato puree and stirred this around until the flour started to colour. I then added white wine to deglaze the rest of the pan and stirred the mixture until smooth.

I then added chicken stock and boiled the gravy until it reduced down to a nice thickness. This was seasoned with salt, pepper and a touch of lemon juice (squeezed from the lemon retrieved from the roasted chicken’s insides) before being passed through a sieve into a jug for serving.

To plate the dish I cut the chicken into two halves and served each half with the bread sauce, gravy and some simple steamed vegetables. It looked and smelled delicious!

The verdict? A really good Sunday roast. The bread sauce, which I had never made before, turned out really well. The flavours of the cloves and nutmeg really coming through. The chicken skin was perfectly browned and crispy and the meat was ideal with the gravy, which tasted surprisingly rich and hearty.  Of course, a Sunday lunch isn’t a Sunday lunch without a pudding, so we followed up with a homemade pear and blackberry crumble, after which there was only one thing left to do. Sleep!