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Cooking a Whole Chicken in the Crockpot
The aroma of juicy, succulent chicken greeting you when you come home is a great welcome. A fresh, raw chicken is about eighty percent water and cooking poultry is a battle to hang on to as much moisture as possible, to give you a deliciously moist and succulent bird. If you have a crockpot, cooking whole chicken is quite simple.
Put a peeled, sliced onion in the bottom of your crockpot and remove the giblets from a three or four pound chicken. Rinse the bird, pat it dry with paper towels and rub a couple of teaspoons of oil all over it. Sprinkle some salt and black pepper over the chicken and put it, breast side up, in your crockpot. Peel four garlic cloves and put them around the chicken. Cover it and cook on low until a meat thermometer tells you the inner temperature is 170 degrees F.
Cooking a whole chicken in crockpot will take about seven and a half hours. When the chicken has finished cooking, you should let it stand for at least ten minutes, so the juices can redistribute, keeping the flesh juicy and succulent. Throw the onion and garlic away since they are only used to give flavor, nothing more.
Crockpot chicken recipes can be served with boiled or mashed potatoes and your favorite vegetables. Once you have tasted tender crockpot chicken recipes, it will become your preferred method of cooking poultry.
Cooking a Whole Chicken with Salad Dressing
Another good method, if you want to know how to cook chicken in a slow cooker, is to use a whole chicken and half a cup of your favorite salad dressing. You need to clean your chicken, then rub salad dressing all over it, inside and out, and sprinkle some salt and pepper over that. Then cook on high for four to five hours or low for eight to ten hours.
Poultry does very well in crockpot recipes because the long, slow cooking means the chicken marinates in the seasonings and juices while it cooks. Slow cooked chicken is tender and juicy.
Cooking Chicken Pieces in a Crockpot
There are lots of crockpot chicken recipes using BBQ sauce combined with catsup or water. You can also combine BBQ sauce with wine. Cabernet sauvignon and burgundy wine are both good options and they bring out the rich, meaty flavor of chicken thighs particularly well.
Crockpot chicken marsala is an impressive looking dish and chicken satay cooks well on skewers over a hot grill or just as well off the skewers and in a warm crockpot. You need to flatten chicken breasts and add soy sauce, sugar, pepper, curry powder, and garlic for satay chicken. Lemon or limejuice gives the dish a nice kick and you simply cook the chicken for five or six hours on a low heat. You can make peanut sauce, to serve it with, from peanut butter, limejuice, water, sugar, garlic, and ginger and heat it on the stove or add it to the crockpot.
However, you cook your chicken, it usually comes out wonderfully in a crockpot recipe. Many easy crockpot recipes feature chicken for this reason and there are crockpot stews, crockpot soups, crockpot appetizer recipes, and more featuring poultry.
