Chipotle Orange Roast Chicken

This roasted chicken was among my most popular recent photos, and it did not disappoint in real life. It was, in fact, among the most delicious chicken roasts I have done. And it was quite simple, thanks to our increasingly favored recipe source, Meredith (Blue Jean Chef) Laurence's Comfortable in the Kitchen. We have cited this book quite a few times since my mother gave it to us, and it is among the first cook books to be added to my virtual Goodreads bookshelf.

As the author notes in the margin above this recipe, this chicken gets very dark on the outside because of the spice rub. Inside -- as she also noted -- it is especially moist.

The rub is made by mincing 2 tablespoon chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (even our rather pedestrian local grocery has this in a can) and mashing it (including some of the sauce) together with 1 tablespoon each of orange zest, ground cumin, brown sugar, and salt. I had somehow forgotten the cumin -- hard to believe, since this is a favorite spice in our house -- when I heard it named on a cooking show that was playing on the radio while I cooked. So I added it to the rub just in time.

The recipe calls for beer, wine, water, or broth to be placed in the roasting pan. Since I was using our upright roaster, I filled the center well with some of our recently-brewed pale ale. This is the main reason we use this funky roaster, and it was Step One in making this an exceptionally moist bird.

Step Two was the Blue Jean Chef's genius suggestion to cut the orange (from which I got the zest) in half and put it inside the chicken. It was a big orange, so I quartered it and put it in the chicken.

I then roasted this in the convection oven, starting at 425 or 450F and then turning it down. This chicken was bigger than the four-pounder called for, so the baking took longer than expected, a bit under 2 hours. As the Chef suggests, I checked it with a thermometer to ensure it had reached 165.

This was every bit as delicious as it looks. We look forward to even better results at some point when we try this in the Big Green Egg.