Jul 20

Jul 20 Pilipino Pantry: Whole Rotisserie Chicken Hack

One of the biggest hills to climb when moving abroad is grocery shopping.

Walking wide eyed through aisles filled with foreign foods and foreign price tags your brain tries as hard as it can to digest it all. This can be overwhelming but also exhilarating at the same time.

After a number of years I have come to prefer wet markets and Filipino grocery stores for produce, it's what makes sense to my brain now. However, for meat, poultry and seafood I stick to Landers or Hypermarket. I have gotten used to the whole fish, fish heads, chicken innards, feet etc. These aren't common sites back in the States. Our meats all come in tailored packages with enough plastic to mound a landfill, our chicken breasts might as well come in a Tiffany & Co box. I prefer the simple newspaper wrapper or baying from the palengke. I’ve often wondered what happens to the rest of the chicken in America and where all the breasts are in Filipino dishes? It's like we have the two extremes going on.

As I mentioned above, whole everything (fish, chicken, pig) is a common site in grocers here. A pitiful secret of mine, I've never roasted a whole chicken. I know, how shameful. I gave myself a challenge this week to not be wasteful and cook a whole chicken, and no, it did not come in a Tiffany & Co box but in a Magnolia whole chicken single plastic wrapper. :) Which by the way they are antibiotic and hormone free!

With some help from my toddler and a recent visit to SOUV we mastered a Greek inspired roast chicken.

To prepare the chicken we layered our dish with olive oil, lemon slices, salt, garlic and dried basil. I remember growing up with my own mother baking a 40 clove garlic roast chicken. Her secret was to stuff the garlic under the skin.

In my opinion, lemon makes everything better. It can go either sweet or savory.

After you've layered the bottom of the pan, layer the top of of the chicken and use my momma's secret, layer garlic under the skin.

Here comes the hack for a perfect rotisserie chicken, throw it in the slow cooker on high for 4 hours. Remove from crock pot, including juices, and broil for 15 minutes to brown the skin and give it a slight crunch.