De-smoking the roast chicken

We're great fans of roasted chicken and I make it quite often. One of the problems we have involves our lack of a range hood. When roasting on a rack at high temp, the fat drips down into the roasting pan and can produce a pretty significant amount of smoke. One way I've gotten around this in the past is to line the bottom of the roasting pan with potato slices that have been tossed in a little oil. The fat that drips down just soaks into the potatoes and never gets smoky. We get nice roast chicken and we don't have to turn the whole house fan on to be able to see across the kitchen. The potatoes can be eaten, but often they're either a little too done or a bit too drenched in the chicken fat to be all that great.

Last night, we were having friends over for supper and I decided to do roast chicken. This time, in addition to lining the pan with oiled potato slices, I tossed some thick slices of yellow onion on top. I drizzled a little bit of oil over them, put the rack with the chicken pieces on top, and roasted it all. The potatoes were again a little too fatty to be worth serving but the onions were excellent. I pulled the chicken pieces off, put them in a serving dish, and then scattered the onions on top of everything. They were delicious, they added a nice extra element to the chicken, and the comments were all very positive. I'll be doing that again.

As True Love is always telling me: Clean the oven!

Mike, that sounds great. We adore roast chicken, so I will try that with the onions next time.
As you know, the chicken itself makes a huge difference. When we are in NC, we shop at Fresh Market (a great little store). They have all natural, antibiotic-free chickens (there is no brand name...they are just on ice under their fresh meat case) and they are THE BEST tasting chickens. It's gotten to the point that I don't even make roast chicken when we are in CA since about all I can get is Foster Farms. Blech. (I should add the caveat that we are in the Palm Springs area and could probably get better chickens at the specialty stores up valley from us, but they are a good 30 minute drive, so I only do that if I'm already up that way.)

Mike, I like to do a meatloaf on my grill. I do it in a dutch oven and as we all know quite a lot of fat cooks out of the meat even if one uses a 85/15 04 80/20 ground beef. So, what I do is cover the bottom of the Do with stale bread, then set the trivet on the bread, followed with the loaf. hen done I simply take the meat and trivet out, take the fat soaked bread out, mix with mashed potatoes, and my dog get some of it daily for about 3 meals. That makes me and the dog happy!

Carrie - We get our chicken from the market around the corner. They sell Mary's, which is a good brand. The best I've had, though, was whole chicken purchased at one of the Asian markets here. Still had head and feet on it and was just wrapped in a plastic bag. Mary's is always good but that one was exceptional.

Bob - You have one very lucky dog!!

I find that if I trim some of the chicken fat off, it helps a lot. There's often a significant amount of fat that you can trim off a whole chicken, if you look around the opening and the thighs.

I find that if I trim some of the chicken fat off, it helps a lot. There's often a significant amount of fat that you can trim off a whole chicken, if you look around the opening and the thighs.

Lee, I actually make just thighs for a lot of my chicken dishes and do loads of trimming before I cook them. It's amazing how much fat and extra skin you can trim off, isn't it?

I trim ours as well, but I like I still find we get quite a bit of smoking if we roast without anything under the chicken.