Nine Dinners from One Roast Chicken
The roast chicken is the most useful single piece of cooking in the home cook's repertoire. Not because roasting a chicken is particularly interesting or difficult, but because what comes after the initial roast is where the real value lies. A 2kg chicken roasted on a Sunday evening, carved and eaten as a proper dinner for two, still has enough remaining for several more substantial meals spread across the week. The carcass, the fat, the cooking juices, and the remaining meat are all ingredients in their own right, not waste. Used intelligently, that single bird can anchor five or six additional meals.
The roast itself
A good roast chicken is simple: dry the bird thoroughly inside and out with kitchen paper. Season generously with fine salt, including under the skin of the breasts where you can reach by pulling the skin gently back from the flesh. Stuff the cavity with half a lemon, a garlic head halved horizontally, a few sprigs of thyme. Rub the outside with butter or olive oil. Roast at 220°C for 20 minutes per 500g plus 20 minutes, or until the thickest part of the thigh reads 74°C on a thermometer. Rest for 15 minutes before carving.
Carve and serve the best parts — the breast and the skin — as the main dinner. Leave the thighs, drumsticks, and wings for the uses below, or serve one thigh per person alongside the breast. Reserve the carcass, any cooking juices in the tin, and the cavity aromatics.
Dinner 2: Chicken salad
Shred the remaining white meat and toss with a simple dressing (mayonnaise, dijon mustard, lemon juice, salt, a small amount of tarragon or chives), toasted walnuts or almonds, and crisp celery or apple slices. Serve on thick toast, in a baguette, over dressed greens, or in Little Gem lettuce cups. Chicken salad from roast chicken is incomparably better than anything made from poached breast — the roasted flavour and slightly irregular texture cannot be replicated from a boil.
Dinner 3: Chicken soup from the stock
The carcass is the most valuable single thing the chicken produces beyond the initial dinner. Put it in a large pot with any reserved cooking juices, the cavity aromatics, two carrots, two celery stalks, one onion halved, a bay leaf, and a few peppercorns. Cover with cold water, bring slowly to a simmer, skim, and simmer for two to three hours. Strain. You have chicken stock of a quality that no carton can match. Taste it — it should be deeply savoury and slightly gelatinous when cold.
For a simple soup: soften diced onion, carrot, and celery in butter. Add the stock. Add cooked pasta or noodles or pearl barley. Add any remaining shredded chicken meat. Season. This is one of the most restorative meals in existence and it costs virtually nothing beyond the vegetables.
Dinner 4: Chicken noodle or ramen
With the same homemade stock, build a more substantial bowl: bring the stock to a simmer with a few slices of ginger, two garlic cloves, a splash of soy sauce, and a small amount of miso dissolved into it. Add cooked noodles, thinly sliced spring onions, a soft-boiled egg, and any remaining chicken meat. A drizzle of sesame oil and a sprinkle of chilli flakes finishes it. It is technically a cheat ramen but it tastes like the genuine article.
Dinner 5: Chicken fried rice
Day-old rice — rice that has been cooked, cooled, and refrigerated overnight — is essential for good fried rice. Its lower moisture content means the grains separate and fry rather than steaming. Heat a wok until very hot. Add a neutral oil. Add beaten eggs and scramble quickly. Add the rice and stir fry over high heat until the grains are separate and beginning to colour. Add shredded chicken, soy sauce, a small amount of sesame oil, frozen peas or finely sliced spring onions, white pepper. Eat immediately. This is a genuinely excellent way to use leftover rice and chicken, and it comes together in under ten minutes.
Dinner 6: Chicken tacos
Warm pulled chicken meat in a small pan with cumin, smoked paprika, a small amount of chipotle in adobo, and a splash of water or stock until sticky and hot. Serve in warmed corn tortillas with shredded cabbage dressed in lime juice, sliced avocado, pickled jalapeños, and a generous amount of fresh coriander. The smoky, spiced preparation is completely different in character from the original roast, which is the point — the same meat reinvented into something that does not feel like leftovers.
Dinner 7: Chicken and leek pot pie
Melt butter in an oven-safe pan. Soften sliced leeks until completely soft. Add flour and cook for two minutes, stirring. Add chicken stock gradually, stirring constantly, until you have a thick, creamy sauce. Season generously. Add shredded chicken meat and any other vegetables — peas, corn, cooked carrot. Top with rough squares of puff pastry or a lid of mashed potato. Bake at 200°C until bubbling and golden. This uses both the leftover meat and some of the homemade stock and produces something that feels genuinely celebratory rather than thrifty.
Dinner 8: Chicken congee
Congee — the Asian rice porridge — is the most versatile use of chicken stock and leftover chicken. Simmer rice in a generous amount of chicken stock (roughly 8:1 stock to rice ratio) for 45 minutes to an hour, stirring occasionally, until the rice breaks down into a porridge. Add shredded chicken meat in the final ten minutes. Serve in deep bowls with toppings: sliced spring onions, a drizzle of sesame oil, soy sauce, white pepper, fresh ginger, crispy fried shallots, a soft-boiled egg. Congee is warm and deeply comforting and uses very little besides stock and rice.
Dinner 9: Chicken quesadillas or sandwich
The most humble final use: warm whatever remaining chicken exists, pull it roughly, and either: melt it between two tortillas with cheese for quesadillas (with sour cream and salsa on the side), or pile it into a sandwich with good bread, mayonnaise, mustard, sliced tomato, and lettuce. Neither is glamorous but both are satisfying, and both represent the end of a bird that has been used fully and intelligently across a week of cooking.
The chicken fat
One final resource worth noting: the fat that renders out of the chicken during roasting, collected in the tin, is schmaltz — rendered chicken fat — and it is an excellent cooking fat. Strain it into a jar and refrigerate. Use it to fry potatoes (the best roast potatoes you will make), to soften onions for soup, or to cook eggs. It keeps refrigerated for two weeks and adds a deep, chickeny richness to anything cooked in it. A chicken yields roughly 60 to 100ml of usable fat depending on its size. Discard nothing.
