For the Best Roast Chicken, Slather Your Spatchcock in Mayo

At its best, roast chicken is the epitome of comfort food: Juicy meat, crackly skin, aromas that fill the kitchen, and flavor to match. Yet, achieving this ideal can be elusive, often resulting in disappointingly dry breast meat or flabby, flavorless skin. As simple as a roast chicken is, it’s one of the easiest roasts to over- or undercook. (Or, in some cases, do both simultaneously).

The first step to improving your roast chicken game is the same step you should take for improving virtually all of your meat cookery, from holiday roasts to steak night to low and slow barbecue: Get a good thermometer. More on that later, and on why I decided to partner with my friend Chris Young’s company Combustion, Inc. to show you how game changing their Predictive Thermometer can be.

The fundamental challenge in cooking chicken lies in the different cooking requirements of a chicken's sensitive breast meat and its more forgiving dark meat. Breast meat, being leaner, dries out quickly above 150°F (66°C), while the collagen-rich leg meat requires a higher temperature, ideally above 175°F (80°C), to become tender and succulent as collagen converts to gelatin. This disparity often forces you to choose between a dry breast or undercooked legs.

On top of that, there’s the balancing act of ensuring that the skin renders to golden crispness just as the meat finishes cooking. It’s a challenge that’s almost as difficult as getting two kids out of the door with all the right bits of clothes on the right bits of their bodies. (Ask me how I know.)

Fortunately, there are two techniques I turn to when I roast chickens that handily solve these problems. One of them is good old spatchcocking, which I’ve been espousing the virtues of since the early days of Serious Eats (you can find my article and recipe for spatchcock chicken from 2009 right here). The other is using a mayonnaise-based marinade, a technique I started playing with for the New York Times in 2019 (you can find my first mayo-marinade article here)

Combining these methods, as I did for my Thanksgiving turkey recipe from the New York Times a couple years ago, paves the way for a chicken that is evenly cooked, incredibly moist, and boasts gorgeously browned, crispy skin.

Spatchcocking: Flattening the Way to Even Cooking

Also known as butterflying, spatchcocking involves removing the chicken's backbone, allowing the bird to be flattened. This simple preparation offers significant advantages in roasting:

• Even Heat Distribution: By lying flat, the chicken presents a more uniform thickness to the heat source. The thicker dark meat, positioned towards the outer edges of the roasting pan where heat convection currents are often stronger, cooks faster than the leaner breast meat situated in the slightly cooler center. This allows both to reach their optimal temperatures simultaneously.
• Faster Cooking Time: A flattened bird has more surface area exposed to the hot oven air, leading to a significantly reduced cooking time compared to a traditional trussed chicken. This means getting that delicious roast chicken on the table quicker.
• Crispier Skin: With the entire skin surface exposed directly to the oven's heat, spatchcocking promotes maximum browning and crisping, eliminating the soggy patches often found on the underside of a conventionally roasted bird.
• A Chicken Backbone for Making Sauce: This technique leaves you with a chicken backbone which you can use to enhance the flavor of whatever jus, sauce, or gravy you plan to accompany the chicken.

The easiest way to spatchcock a chicken is to ask someone else to do it for you. The second easiest is to do it yourself with a set of heavy poultry shears. 

1. Using sturdy poultry shears, cut along both sides of the chicken's spine to remove it.

2. Flip the chicken over, splaying its legs out with the drumsticks pointed out and away from the breast. 

3. Press firmly on the breastbone until you hear a crack and the bird lies flat.

4. Tuck the wing tips behind the breast to prevent them from burning.

5. Optional: use the tip of a paring knife to cut around the wishbone from the top of the breast (go in through under the skin where the chicken’s neck would be) and a kitchen towel to grip it and pull it out before roasting.

Once the chicken is spatchcocked, I place it on a rack set in a rimmed aluminum baking sheet (I prefer a rimmed baking sheet to a deeper roasting pan, as the tall sides of a roasting pan can shield the chicken from the most intense heat of the oven), season it, then roast it at 425°F until it hits the right temperature. While it’s roasting, I like to put together a gravy or jus using some vegetables, the backbones, and some store-bought or homemade chicken stock finished with butter and lemon.

Now let’s discuss mayo.

Mayo Chickens Always Be Flavorful

“What’s the point of all this?”

That’s what I used to think to myself every time I followed a recipe that suggested rubbing my chicken or turkey with a copious slathering of herb butter, only for that butter to melt and drop right off down into the bottom of the pan as soon as the chicken went in the oven.

A much better base for your herbs or other seasonings is mayonnaise. Yes, mayonnaise. I combine it with a generous amount of flavorful herbs and blend it into a mayo marinade. A mayonade, if you will.

Here’s what it’s got to offer:

• Superior Flavor Adhesion: Mayonnaise, an emulsion of oil, egg yolk, and acid, provides a stable base for carrying flavors. When herbs, spices, garlic, or citrus zest are mixed into mayonnaise and slathered over the chicken, the marinade adheres beautifully to the skin and meat, ensuring that these flavors stay put rather than running off into the pan.
• Exceptional Browning and Crisping: The egg proteins in mayonnaise contribute to the Maillard reaction, the chemical process responsible for the desirable browning and complex flavors developed during cooking. This results in a deeply burnished and wonderfully crispy skin.

For this particular roast chicken, I blend herbs (the Scarborough Fair quartet of parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme) along with some garlic, scallion, lemon zest, salt, pepper, and a pinch of MSG into store-bought mayonnaise before rubbing it all over the spatchcock in preparation for its time in the oven.

(NB: I would strongly recommend against using Kewpie or a similar Japanese mayonnaise for this recipe–it gets an odd fishy aroma when it is heated and cooked that I find very off-putting.)

By combining the structural advantage of spatchcocking, the precision of a good thermometer and the flavor-enhancing properties of a mayonnaise marinade, you set the stage for a truly exceptional roast chicken. The kind that will have you saying, ‘Please, sir. Mayo I have some more spatchcock?”

Sidebar: Why Thermometers?

Over the years, my roast chicken game has gone through several distinct phases of increasing precision and a corresponding improvement in juiciness and overall quality.

The Worst: [X] Minutes Per Pound. I used to roast chickens using a timer, following the x-minutes-per-pound charts you often find printed in older recipe books. This method is wildly unpredictable, mainly because ovens can vary in their heating patterns, convection patters, and accuracy and because chickens can vary in geometry.

Slightly Better: Clear Juices. A common bit of advice is to use a visual cue, such as “letting the juices run clear” when you slit the joint between the leg and the carcass. This method will at least tell you that your chicken has cooked to a high enough temperature that muscle pigments have denatured and lost their red color. Unfortunately, by the time this happens, your breasts are likely far overcooked. You can guarantee chicken that’s safe to eat, but not always good to eat. A brine can help mitigate some of this dryness.

Excellent: Use a Thermometer. A thermometer is a reliable way to tell when your meat is cooked properly. So long as the coolest part of the breast meat spends at least 10 minutes above the 145°F mark and below 155 to 160°F or so (see pasteurization chart below) in total during cooking and resting before cutting into it, your chicken breast will end up both safe to eat, and incredibly juicy–no brine even necessary. 

The Game Changer: The Predictive Thermometer from Combustion, Inc. At first glance, the  Predictive Thermometer from my long-time friend and colleague Chris Young’s company Combustion, Inc., looks just like any other remote instant-read thermometer. It has a sharp business end, a jaunty yellow handle that houses the wifi and bluetooth connections, and an external monitor for temperature readings (you can also see more detailed readings on your phone).

The difference is that this thermometer in fact holds multiple sensors along its length, allowing it to take temperature measurements all along its length from outside the meat and straight to the middle.

What doe it mean for you as a cook? No more fiddling around trying to pinpoint the exact center of the thickest part of the roast. Just stick the Predictive Thermometer in the meat making sure it passes through  the thickest part of it (no need to hit the center precisely), and it’ll automatically figure out the internal temperature of the roast using its array of sensors.

Not only that, but the built-in predictive algorithms take into account internal temperature, surface temperature, and ambient temperature to accurately predict exactly how long a given piece of meat will take to achieve your desired temperature. In my experience it’s accurate down to the minute, or even down to the second.

The combination of spatchcock and mayonaide is a truly magical one, producing the best chickens I've roasted in a while.

Now: I wonder if slathering my kids in herb mayo and poking them with a thermometer will allow me to accurately gauge how long it'll take to get out of the door?

A dad can dream.

A Note on Chicken and Food Safety

Forget what you think you know about safe cooking temperatures – or at least, be open to a more nuanced understanding. While food safety courses rightly highlight the 40–140°F (4–60°C) "danger zone" as a range where bacteria can multiply, and strongly advise against leaving food in it for over four hours, the common instruction to cook chicken to 165°F (74°C) only tells part of the story.

Consider the rise of precision cooking methods like sous vide, where food is held at temperatures well below 140°F for extended periods and is perfectly safe. My own recommendation for cooking chicken is typically 145–150°F (63–66°C) – noticeably lower than the standard 165°F. This might seem contradictory to everything you've been taught, prompting the question: is chicken cooked this way truly safe?

The discrepancy arises because standard food safety guidelines are intentionally simplified for widespread application. They provide easy-to-follow rules that work across various food service environments. However, the reality of bacterial inactivation is more complex than a simple temperature threshold.

The fundamental principle is this: Food safety is a function of both temperature and the duration of exposure to that temperature.

The USDA's goal for chicken safety is a 7.0 log10 reduction in Salmonella bacteria – leaving only one out of every 10,000,000 bacteria survining. This critical level of pasteurization can be achieved via different time and temperature combinations.

To illustrate this relationship, I've created a simplified chart based on data from the USDA's guidelines (specifically page 37 of their PDF). It shows the various time/temperature combinations required to achieve a 7-log10lethality in chicken with 5% fat content:

Temperature: Time 

136°F (58°C): 68.4 minutes 

140°F (60°C): 27.5 minutes 

145°F (63°C): 9.2 minutes 

150°F (66°C): 2.8 minutes 

155°F (68°C): 47.7 seconds 

160°F (71°C): 14.8 seconds 

165°F (74°C): Instant 

So, for instance, when the internal temperature of the chicken is at 155°F, you need only hold that temperature for roughly 48 seconds to fully pasteurize it. At 145°F, it takes a little over 9 minutes.

I don’t like my chicken to get much above 150, so all I have to do is ensure that between roasting and resting, the center hits above 145°F and stays there for at least 9.2 minutes, and it’ll be perfectly safe to it.

Recipe: The Best Roast Chicken (Spatchcocked and Slathered in Herb Mayo)

Every reipe I publish here is personally tested, tasted, and approved.

What I like about this recipe:

• Achieve incredibly moist breast and tender dark meat every time thanks to even spatchcock cooking and precise temperature monitoring.
• Get extraordinarily crispy, deeply flavorful skin by using a mayonnaise marinade that adheres herbs and promotes perfect browning.
• Cook your chicken significantly faster than traditional methods because spatchcocking exposes more surface area to the oven's heat.
• Create a delicious, flavorful jus using the chicken backbone removed during spatchcocking, adding depth to your meal.

Yield: 1 roast chicken, serving 4

Active Time: 25 minutes

Total Time: 1 ½ hours

Ingredients

For the Mayonade and Chicken:

½ cup (120ml) mayonnaise

A big handful of mixed herbs, such as parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, stems removed (reserve for the jus)

2 medium cloves garlic, trimmed

2 scallions, trimmed

Small pinch of MSG (optional)

Large pinch of salt

A few big grinds of black pepper

The zest of 1 lemon (reserve the lemon to juice into the sauce)

1 whole chicken, about 3 12 to 4 ½  pounds (1.5 to 2kg)

For the jus:

2 teaspoons (10ml) olive oil

1 medium onion, roughly chopped

2 ribs celery, roughly chopped

1 medium carrot, roughly chopped

The stems and a few extra whole sprigs from the herbs you used on the chicken

1 bay leaf

2 cups (480ml) homemade or store-bought low-sodium chicken stock

A squeeze of lemon juice

2 teaspoons (10ml) soy sauce

3 tablespoons (40g) unsalted butter

A tablespoon of minced fresh parsley leaves

Steps

1. For the Mayonade and Chicken: Adjust your oven rack to the center position and preheat oven to 425°F. Combine the mayonnaise, herbs, garlic, scallion, MSG (optional), salt, pepper, and lemon zest in a container just large enough to fit the head of an immersion blender. Blend until no large pieces of herbs remain. (Alternatively, use a food processor.)

2. Using a set of sharp poultry shears, cut down either side of the backbone, removing it. Snip the backbone into a few chunky pieces and set them aside.

3. Flip the chicken over skin-side-up, splay out the legs, and press down firmly along its sternum until you feel a small crack and the chicken lies flat. Tuck the wing tips behind the breast.

4. Rub the mayo mixture all over all surfaces of the chicken, over and under, then transfer the chicken to a wire rack set in a rimmed baking sheet with the skin-side-up.

5. Place in the oven and roast until the exterior is deeply browned an the internal temperature of the chicken registers 145 to 150°F, about 45 minutes. (I use the Combustion, Inc. Predictive Thermometer for this.

6. Remove the chicken from the oven and allow to rest for ten minutes before carving and serving.

7. Meanwhile, for the jus: While the chicken cooks, heat the olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the onions, celery, carrot, and chicken back pieces and cook, stirring, until very lightly browned, a few minutes. Add the herb stems, bay leaf, and chicken stock and bring to a simmer. Cook until the chicken is done roasting.

8. Strain the broth through a fine mesh strainer, discarding the solids, then return the liquid to the saucepan. Add the lemon juice, soy sauce, and butter. Bring to a hard boil and cook until reduced to an intense jus. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Add parsley and stir in just before serving. Pour the jus over the carved chicken pieces, serving extra jus on the side. No