How Long Does Chicken Need to Cook

How long does chicken need to cook? I usually cook my chicken like I cook my turkey.....15 minutes per pound. But I do like to cook at a very low temperature (300 degrees or less) so I usually add a little extra time to my cooking. I generally add a little moisture to my chicken and seal the pot up good with tinfoil so the bird basically steams.

Tonight I served up a whole chicken roasted in the crock pot. I love to serve chicken this way as then I don't need to worry about how long the chicken needs to cook. I usually defrost the bird a day or two ahead of time and it is ready to go in the crock pot in the morning. By evening the meat is ready to fall off the bone and it is moist and delicious.

A few tips in crock pot cooking. I usually put 1/4 - 1/2 inch of water in the pot. Then I put a small grate on the bottom of the pot followed by some tinfoil on which I place the chicken. Sometimes I put celery/apples/garlic/onions etc. inside the bird's cavity. Today I didn't. But instead I crushed some cloves of garlic and mashed them into some butter with a little fresh rosemary and sea salt. I then rubbed this under the skin of the breast of the chicken. I applied a few more sprigs of rosemary and salt and pepper on top and that was it. I turned the crock pot on LOW and let it cook all day. Boy did the breast meat taste great!

I cooked a roasting chicken we raised ourselves this year. The big thing I noticed about how it was different from a conventional chicken was that there wasn't a ton of extra fat on that chicken. After eating dinner I cooked all the bones in a pot of water for stock. I added the juice left from the crock pot to the boiled down stock so I didn't waste a drip of that delicious chicken broth. Chicken broth has great immune building properties so be sure to get all the mileage from your chicken that you can. I noticed that there was very little fat from the broth....a great incentive to raise birds again next year for sure.

Remember, add extra time for cooking if you cook on low temps. The benefit of low temperature cooking is that your meat will be soft and fall of the bone. So that's the long winded answer for how long does chicken need to cook.