Five-Spice Roast Chicken with Honey

Tender, Juicy, Succulent

As you know, we never get tired of eating chicken, especially roast chicken. Why roast chicken?

Well, we love Hainanese chicken rice, and other chicken dishes in general. But after we roasted our first chicken and saw the prodigious amount of chicken fat dripping into the drip pan, we realized roasting was a healthier way to enjoy chicken, minus the artery-clogging chicken fat!

Besides, we love chicken that is tender, juicy and succulent. And we make our roast chicken that way.

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Today's dish is a twist on an old favorite - rock salt roast chicken flavored with Five Spice powder, honey and tangy lime.

How does it taste? Well, why don't you try the recipe and find out yourself? Then leave a word to let us know.


Ingredient:

1 JF Fresh Chicken, 1.3 kg, special black leg breed, $7.20 at Sheng Shiong.

For Honey Marinade:

6 tbl light soya sauce
1 tbl brown sugar
4 tbl honey
2 tbl water
1 large Malaysian lime

For dusting / sprinkling on Skin:

5-Spice, 1 tbl
Salt, 1 tbl

Method

1. Clean, wash chicken and pat dry.

2. Dry rub the chicken thoroughly inside and out with 2 tbl salt and leave overnight hrs in fridge.

3. Next morning, wash away excess salt and pat dry.

4. Bring the honey marinade nearly to a boil in a small pot, then spoon the marinade over the chicken in a pan. Return excess marinade in the chicken pan to the marinade pot to heat it up again. Repeat the spooning process. Do the spoon-returning-heating process several times, until the chicken has a nice brown caramelized coating of the marinade. When you heat the marinade, take care not to burn the sugar or honey.

5. After several coatings with the hot marinade, leave bird to air-dry for 30-min.

6. Set oven on 250-deg C / max.

7. Sprinkle or dust chicken with 5-spice and salt mixture on skin before putting in oven. Prick lime in several places with a fork and place inside chicken cavity.

8. When oven is at 250-deg C, place chicken breast side down on rack with casserole containing 1-inch water below rack to catch dripping. Turn down oven immediately to 175-deg and roast for 20 min. Check for color, then roast a further 3-5 min if necessary. When skin is roasted a nice color, turn over to roast other side at 175-deg for 20 min.

9. We turned up oven to 220-deg C for another 4 min for a total roast time of 44 min for our 1.3 kg fowl.

Note: For a 1.7 kg bird, we usually roast for 50 min at 175-deg C turning up temp to 220-deg to crisp skin 4-5 min before the end of the 50-min. Also, we set oven at 250-deg C and when ready, put chicken in hot oven and immediately turn down temperature to 175-deg C. That should crisp the chicken back quite nicely. We adjust the timing depending on the weight of the chicken. In this case, given the 1.3 kg weight, we roasted for a total of 44 min.

Verdict: Roast was juicy and succulent. We were lucky we hit the exact roasting time, as the meat was tender and moist - just the way we relished our roast.

Important Note: Your oven may behave differently from ours. We spent several months trying to get the perfect roast, experimenting with different temperature settings, before we hit the right roast temperature and timing for our oven.

That's because after we moved house and installed a new Rinnai oven, we found our roasts were always overdone when we roasted at 200-deg C! Why 200-deg C? Because our previous Bauknet oven gave us a perfect roast at 200-deg C, so we set our Rinnai oven to roast at that temperature too, with vastly different outcome.

So if your oven doesn't give you a perfect roast, try using different temperature and timing. Once you find the sweet spot, you will be able to get consistent result roast after roast for your particular oven. Good luck!