Roasted Chicken

I have been cooking for some of the Sunday dinners, one of the dishes that I love to serve will be roasted chicken. This recipe is the roasted chicken that you can find in the chicken rice store, original recipe is using oil frying but I used oven to roast it. I am trying to minimize deep frying in my house (even though my helper can help me to deep fry but I just dislike the feeling of the whole house is so oily and smoky after each deep frying.

I am also trying to "convert" my MIL to use oven to bake the fried chicken wings instead of deep frying. Although the result is not as crispy as using oil to deep fry but still crispy and tasty, more healthy too. I love seeing the oil dripping down from the chicken when baking in the oven, feel so happy that the oil didn't go into my body :P.

Back to the roasted chicken, I used the sauce to braise some hard boiled eggs since dear daughter and myself love braised eggs. Dear daughter is crazy over hard boiled eggs, one of her tea break will be hard boiled egg if she is hunting for food. Sometimes she can eat as many as 3 eggs per day but only the whites, she will discard the yolk since is too dry for her (she is so alike of me, I dislike the egg yolk of hard boiled egg too :P). I cooked the chicken rice using ready-mix sauce to go with the roasted chicken, easy and fast and yummy :).

Recipe Adapted from Kitchen Caper

Ingredients :
1 Chicken about 1.2kg

Marinate
1/2 cup dark and light soya sauce
1 tbsp chopped ginger
1 tbsp chopped garlic
2 tbsp 5 spice powder
3 tbsp honey
2 tbsp hua-tiao wine
1 tbsp sesame oil
3 tbsp salt (cut to 2 tbsp)
1/2 tsp pepper
1.5l water

Method :
1. Bring to boil all the marinate
2. Add cleaned chicken and boil briefly for about 2 mins, turning the chicken to ensure that all parts are marinated.
3. Off the fire and leave chicken in the pot to soak, turn it once in a while. Season for about 2 hours.
4. Drain the chicken and leave to dry for a while.
5. Roast chicken at pre-heat oven at 180C for 40-50 mins or knife goes in to the thickest part of thigh and water from chicken comes out clear.
6. Let it cool before cutting & serving with a mixture of soya sauce, sesame oil and water.

Verdict?
The chicken is too salty, I will definitely need to further reduce the salt to 1 tbsp or less if I am going to cook it again. The meat is quite tender even for breast meat but the skin is not as crispy as the oil fry version and in all, still quite delicious.