Spatchcocked chicken

I like the idea of grilling a whole chicken, spatchcocked and laid flat on the rack. It suggests a rustic approach to outdoors cooking. But it’s a difficult process to get right. The heat from a grill may be fierce, and burn the exterior of the bird or toughen some of the meat before cooking it through.

The weather still being inimical to barbecues, I cooked my spatcocked chicken at the bottom of my grill drawer, with the heat set to its lowest. I didn’t help my cause by using soy sauce in the marinade, along with the juice of a lemon, a couple of glugs of olive oil, and a couple of cloves of crushed garlic: the sugar in the sauce caramelises, and burns. You have to turn the chicken regularly.

It took about 45 minutes. This is about half the time that would have been necessary to roast it; nevertheless, the breast was tougher, because of the intense direct heat, than the breast of a roasted chicken would have been. In future, I’d prefer to chop up the chicken, cooking breast and legs for the different times that suit them.