Roast chicken is one of the most popular comfort dishes there is, and is quite possibly the best dish for a family to share. It also has the added benefit of the leftovers being great for stock (to be used in soup or risotto) and sandwiches.

Every chef and cook has their own method of roasting the perfect chook. But all agree that the better and more expensive the chicken, the better the roast. That means buying a free-range or organic bird for the oven.

The key to all recipes is ensuring the tougher thigh meat, which contains a lot of connective tissue, is cooked and tender, while the delicate muscular breast meat, which contains only about 5 per cent fat, remains moist and isn’t overcooked.

As Heston Blumenthal says, the basic problem is that chicken meat is 80 per cent water, so the challenge is to ensure it doesn’t dry out. His solution is to first brine (soak in salted water) the meat, which, he says, means the meat holds onto a greater amount of moisture, before cooking it at a low temperature.

In his TV show, in search of perfection, he cooked the bird at 60°C for about four hours before torching the carcass, giving it to a nice golden colour, and injecting buttery chicken juices into the breast meat.

The problem, however, with this technique is that it is cumbersome for the home cook, and leaves capillaries looking bloody and the meat appearing a bit undercooked to those of us familiar with a more traditional roasted chicken.

One alternative to the Blumenthal approach is to simply remove the wings and legs from the main carcass. This means that it takes less time to cook and, when the breast is ready, it can be removed and not overdone. The trouble with this approach is that there isn’t a beautiful golden brown roast chicken on the table to carve for friends or family.

Instead, the carcass can be placed on its side, exposing the legs on one half to the hottest part of the oven, and then flipped over to expose the other half. In the end, it’s best to keep it simple.

In Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories, which readers of UK’s The Guardian voted the best cookbook of all time, the method is much simpler. A chicken is stuffed with garlic and herbs, perhaps an onion or a lemon. And the skin is seasoned and rubbed with butter (although olive oil can be used). The Hopkinson method involves first roasting the chicken at 230°C for 10 to 15 minutes, before reducing the temperature to 190°C and continuing to roast for a further 45 minutes.

Jamie Oliver achieves a similar effect (preferring olive oil to butter) putting the chicken into a 240°C oven, turning the temperature down immediately to 200°C for 1 hour and 20 minutes.

In the end, it’s about a decent chicken, attention to detail, and plenty of fresh herbs and aromatics.

Recipes

• Roast chicken with sauce Chasseur

• The Cornish (chicken sandwich)