Elevate Your Boring Chicken By Cooking It Like A Pot Roast

Beef pot roasts are a popular meal for a reason: They're simple and easy to make (though first-timers might make some mistakes), cook pretty much entirely hands-off, and they yield one of the tastiest comfort foods around. Pot roast is so good that you might be tempted to cook other proteins, like chicken, in the same fashion. Will it turn out just as well? Is it just as easy? The answer, fortunately, is yes, you can and absolutely should give your boring old chicken the pot roast treatment, and it requires very little variation from its beef counterpart.

Get out a big dutch oven or roasting pan with a lid, place any vegetables you want to cook along with the chicken at the bottom, and then put the seasoned chicken on top, along with a glug of chicken stock or broth, and you can even add a little white wine to the pot for extra flavor — the way you use red wine for beef pot roast. You don't even have to brown the chicken before adding it, as most recipes call for when making this dish with beef (though you surely could if you wanted to). You'll just want to be sure to work the seasonings into the skin really well. Because it gets cooked with the lid on (for at least part of the roasting time), the moisture gets trapped inside the Dutch oven or roasting pan, and it creates super tender, juicy, and flavorful chicken, just as it does when cooking even the most underappreciated, tough cut of beef.

As simple and straightforward as making chicken in the style of pot roast may be, there are a few things you might consider, especially where it's different than making the meal with beef. First of all, it's understood that you'd roast a whole chicken. However, if you don't have a whole chicken, chicken thighs can absolutely be substituted, and they'll come out just as succulent and juicy — if not more so, being that they're made entirely of super-forgiving dark meat, which is difficult to over-cook.

Also, if you're craving pot roast chicken in the dead heat of summer, but you'd rather spend eternity in the fiery flames of hell than turn on your oven (same thing, really), just as you can cook beef pot roast in a slow cooker, so you can cook the chicken version. In this instance, because the slow cooker is so good at rendering moist, fall-apart meat, you could use chicken breasts if you really wanted to (though we still highly recommend a whole chicken or bone-in thighs).

However you choose to cook the chicken and whatever cut of the meat you opt to use, it's very important that you have a meat thermometer to gauge if it's cooked all the way through (just be sure to use it properly). You're looking for 165 degrees Fahrenheit for the whole chicken, but chicken thighs are best at least 20 to 30 degrees higher.