How To Make Rotisserie Chicken (2024)

Making a Rotisserie Chicken at home is much easier than you may think. Once you do make one you will never want to buy a grocery store rotisserie chicken again! Crispy, juicy, and flavorful, this is one fantastic way to cook a chicken.

Chicken is such a great meal at any time of the year, but it is wonderful in the summer when you can gather around the BBQ!Leftover chicken is perfect to use in a casserole, tacos or enchiladas, or a great sandwich!

The recipe to cook a whole chicken on a rotisserie is really very easy to make. Once you have the rotisserie for your BBQ the rest is simple! After getting a taste of the wonderfully juicy, tender roasted chicken you will be making it all the time! There really is nothing better than a homemade rotisserie chicken, hot off the spit!

HELPFUL ITEMS FOR THIS RECIPE

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Bamboo Cutting Board 18 x 12 Inch with Juice Drip Groove

Silicone Basting Brush Set 4 Pack

MAIRICO Ultra Sharp Premium 11-inch Stainless Steel Carving Knife

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE A CHICKEN TO COOK ON A ROTISSERIE?

Cooking times will vary when cooking a chicken on a rotisserie. It will depend upon the size of your chicken and the heat of your BBQ. If you can maintain a constant temperature of 350 to 375 degrees F it should take roughly an hour to an hour and a half to cook.

Keep in mind that you need to cook the chicken until it’s done and not at a specific time. One of the most valuable tools you can have is a good quality temperature probe. Simply insert it in the thickest part of the thigh, not the breast as white meat cooks more quickly. You need to make sure that you have a proper internal temperature. You need to make sure that your temperature probe reads 165 F.

Preparing your chicken

After you have rinsed and patted your chicken dry, before you do anything else, you need to season it, INSIDE! Take about a teaspoon or two of Kosher salt and sprinkle inside the cavity of your chicken. This adds so much flavor to the whole chicken and is something I do every time I have a whole chicken or even a turkey to cook!

OK, now you are ready for the next step in the process, you have to truss your bird. This means that you need to tie it so that the wings and legs are tucked in close to the body of the chicken. I have a great post on this, just click this link, How to Truss and Chicken and I will walk you through the process, it really is pretty easy.

Next, you need to mix up your sauce that is used for basting. Stir together the canola oil (you could use olive oil if you wish), onion powder, garlic powder, ketchup, brown sugar, thyme, ground ginger, paprika, dry mustard, savory, and allspice. I know it seems like a laundry list of ingredients, but trust me when I say this cooked chicken with its crispy skin is going to knock your socks off!

How do you rotisserie a chicken?

Once you have your chicken secured on your spit it’s time to get cooking! Place an aluminum foil pan under the chicken and fill it approximately 1/2 full of water. This does a few things; firstly, it helps to keep your chicken from drying out during the cooking process. Secondly, the pan prevents grease flare-ups from the chicken dripping so your chicken will cook without being scorched or blackened. It also makes clean up a breeze, throw out the used aluminum pan in the garbage, and voila your BBQ grill is perfectly clean!

Brush the chicken with the sauce making sure to coat the entire bird using about 1/3 of the sauce. Keep the lid closed so that you can maintain a constant temperature. Baste the chicken again every 1/2 hour. again using about 1/3 of the sauce each time until it is cooked through.

This will layer on the flavors, making your rotisserie chicken super yummy!

Remove your chicken from the BBQ and remove the spit. Be very careful as the spit will be very hot, I use some clean pliers to help loosen the forks and remove them. You need to make sure that you allow your chicken to rest for 20 minutes or so before carving.

Ingredients:

• Whole chicken
• Canola oil
• Onion powder
• Garlic powder
• Ketchup
• Brown sugar
• Thyme
• Ground ginger
• Paprika
• Dry mustard
• Savory
• Allspice
• Kosher salt

I like to add brown sugar to the basting sauce because I think it really adds some great flavor. The sugar also helps to caramelize the outside of the chicken so you get that gorgeous dark brown coloring on your chicken.

This rotisserie chicken recipe can be modified. For example, we have one large chicken, but you could do 2 smaller chickens using the same recipe. You just might have to make up some additional basting sauce.

Is a rotisserie chicken good for you?

Well yes, rotisserie chicken is good for you, for the most part. Chicken is super high in protein which is essential to help build healthy cells, tissues, muscles, and bones. A 4 ounce serving of rotisserie chicken only contains about 185 calories and 10 grams of fat.

Although, there are a couple of things that you should be aware of with chicken. Firstly the skin, although super tasty when it is crispy, is high in saturated fat, so a little self-control is helpful. Secondly, rotisserie chicken is often over seasoned with salt, making it again very tasty but too much sodium is not a healthy option.

This is one reason why I like to do my own rotisserie chicken; I can control the amount of salt that I add.

How much does a rotisserie chicken cost?

In actual fact, chicken is one of the least expensive proteins you can find in your grocery store. Almost all the grocery stores out there now sell cooked take away rotisserie chicken, I read somewhere that Costco sells close to 60 million rotisserie chickens a year! That’s a whole lot of chickens!!

I know they are easy to pick up and are convenient for dinner, and most stores sell them as a loss leader so they are usually pretty inexpensive. But for the time it takes to cook your own, knowing what you have put in, the health benefits, I think, outweigh the convenience!

Plus, you have to wonder how long those roast chickens at the store have been sitting under the heat lamp. I know when I look at them sometimes they look like they have been there for a while. The skin on them is usually soft and wrinkled, not crispy.

Look at how tender and juicy that chicken is. I like to serve it up with some rice or roasted potatoes, a great green salad, or my personal favorite is Caesar salad!

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