This baked chicken with a delicious and rich filling will be a decoration not only for a home lunch, but also for a festive dinner! The chicken languishes in the oven for quite a long time, the meat turns out tender and juicy! A filling of rice, apples and chestnuts seasoned with sweet thyme, cinnamon and hot pepper will be just the perfect side dish for such a bird.
Wash the chicken well, cut off the fat and send it to salting for 4-6 hours, if the chicken is large, then you can spend the night. In salted chicken salted, saturated with moisture, which allows it not to dry out in the oven. Even the breast is juicy and tender.
Prepare the ingredients for stuffing. My chestnuts are frozen, which I cooked and cleaned thoroughly. I saw this method in a cooking blog. This significantly speeds up and simplifies the cooking process.
Cook the rice until it is half cooked. Peel the apples from the seeds and cut into slices. Mix rice, chestnuts, apples in a bowl, add finely chopped hot pepper, thyme sprigs. Add salt, a spoonful of olive oil and lemon juice, and mix well.
Stuff the chicken with the prepared filling, stick a cinnamon stick in the rice. Stab the abdomen with toothpicks so that the filling does not fall out.
Tie the chicken legs with cooking thread, tuck the wings under the carcass so that they do not burn. Pour vegetable oil over the chicken.
Heat the oven to 200 degrees and bake the chicken for 30 minutes. Then reduce the temperature to 160 and bake for another 1.5 hours (maybe more, the time depends on the size of the chicken). For 15-20 minutes until ready, raise the temperature to form a Golden crust on top.
From long languor at a relatively low temperature, the chicken turns out to be the most tender, the bones simply fall off from the meat.
And the filling is very tasty, fragrant, rich.