This easy citrus roast chicken recipe is bursting with flavor. It’s a recipe that I have been making for a decade.
The secret to this citrus roast chicken is the combination of lemon, orange, garlic, oregano, and basil. Plus some butter. The result is a boldly flavorful chicken, and the drippings make an excellent gravy.
I first shared this recipe way back in 2011 when this website was just getting its start. I am still making this chicken, and I thought it was time to update the post with some better photos.
Roast chicken is one of my favorite meals. It is delicious, requires little time to prepare, and yields a lot of food. It is one of my go-to Sunday dinners. I usually serve roast chicken with mashed potatoes or rice pilaf and a vegetable.
Often, I roast two chickens at a time because roasting an additional chicken doesn’t require much more work. Plus, there is so much that I can make with the extra chicken.
Sometimes I take all the meat off the bones, make chicken stock from scratch and then make chicken tortilla soup. Or I might make chicken enchiladas or an easy salad. Knowing that there is chicken ready to go in the fridge helps me feel like I am ahead on meals for the week. This post shares some of my favorite recipes made with leftover chicken.
Over the years I have written a bunch about roasting chicken. My post about How to Roast Chicken has step by step photos to help you learn how to roast a chicken if you haven’t done it before. My post on How to Make Gravy from Pan Drippings has a video to teach you my techinques for making delicious gravy.
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Citrus Roast Chicken:
This easy citrus roast chicken recipe is bursting with flavor. The chicken is seasoned with lemon, orange, garlic, oregano, and basil giving the meal fresh flavors, and the pan drippings make a delicious gravy! Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees. Remove the giblets from the cavity and throw away. Remove any other packing materials. Rise the chicken in cold water - both outside and inside the cavity. Pat dry with a paper towel. Generously season the inside of the chicken with salt and pepper. Slice one lemon and one orange in half, and squeeze the juice from one half of the lemon and one half of the orange. Remove any seeds and pour into a small bowl. Stir in the olive oil, finely chopped garlic, half of the oregano, and half of the basil. You will use this mixture to baste the chicken. Loosely chop the remaining lemon and orange. Stuff the chicken with the loosely chopped garlic and the chopped lemon and orange. Tie the chicken legs together to help hold the citrus in place. You can use butchers twine, or you can fold up aluminum foil and wrap it around the legs and twist together. Place the chicken breast side up on a roasting pan. In a small bowl, stir together the butter and the remaining oregano and basil. Rub the seasoned butter all over the chicken and then sprinkle the chicken with salt and pepper. Brush some of the lemon and orange juice mixture over the chicken. Once the oven is preheated, place the chicken on a middle rack. As the chicken roasts, you want to make sure that the pan drippings do not burn. Add chicken broth and/or white wine to the bottom of the pan as necessary to prevent the drippings from burning. Baste the chicken every 20 minutes with the lemon and orange juice mixture. The generally accepted cooking time for roast chicken is 20 minutes per pound. Julia Child used the formula 45 minutes plus 7 minutes per pound of meat. Regardless of the formula, you decide to use, you need to cook the chicken until a meat thermometer placed in the inner thigh reads 170 degrees. I like to use an in-oven thermometer that measures the temperature of the chicken while it cooks. Remove the chicken from the roasting pan and tent with foil. Use the drippings from the pan to make gravy. Add any leftover basting mixture to the gravy. Let the chicken sit for a total of 10 minutes before carving.
Citrus Roast Chicken
Ingredients
Instructions