Elevate Your Roast Chicken With A Sweet And Spicy Flair

It doesn't get much better than a good roast chicken. There's a reason that this humble family dish is so beloved, the centrepiece of meals around the world, and found at home and in Michelin starred kitchens alike. It's an exercise in the beauty of simplicity — a few common ingredients coming together to create something wonderfully complex and flavorful. A good bird also makes for a worthy canvas to experiment with. As great as those classic combinations like lemon, rosemary, thyme, and garlic are, you shouldn't feel corralled — why not go free-range with your cooking?

You could, for example, bring a sweet and spicy flair to your next roast chicken. Taking some inspiration from Middle Eastern cookery could seriously upgrade your Sunday lunch. Chicken has a gorgeous savory flavor which pairs well with spices, and would contrast nicely with the aromatic sweetness of spices like cinnamon, cumin, dried chile, and allspice. They'll bring a depth and complexity to roast chicken that will elevate it to new heights. These spices don't just complement the chicken, either — the right combination of aromatics will enhance each others' flavors, sweetness paring down the heat of spice and drawing out its peppery, earthy notes, and the chile deepening cinnamon's sweetness — all of which comes together to give you a truly showstopping chicken. This is a combination that'll bring yet more warmth to an already comforting dish, and makes for a great centrepiece for a family meal (or an easy solo weeknight dinner).

When it comes to actually preparing your sweet and spicy roast chicken, you could just go ahead and season it like you would with salt or pepper — take your chicken, give it a good drizzle of olive oil and rub your spices into (or under) the skin and rest before roasting it. But hold your horses — or, err, chickens — we can do better. The real secret to brilliantly moist, flavorful, spiced roast chicken is to make a compound butter. This is really easy to do in a food processor, but you can just as simply make it with a fork (or your fingers, if you feel like getting a little messy).

Just take some butter and your spices of choice, and mash them together with salt, pepper, and if you like, a little olive oil. The olive oil's bitterness adds another layer to your chicken's flavor profile, complementing the sweet spices beautifully. It'll also help ensure the chicken's skin gets super crisp while retaining lots of lovely moisture in the meat itself. For even crispier skin, get your hands in between the skin and the meat of the bird, gently separating them and creating a little pocket of air underneath — that'll allow the skin to puff up, drying out and getting shatteringly crisp. For an extra kick of sweetness, try making a trivet of onions, dates, or even tangerines, which will infuse the chicken as it cooks.

How exactly you flavor your chicken is up to you — but there are a few spices that work particularly well, especially if you're aiming for that sweet and spicy flavor. Cinnamon is a bit of a dark horse here – while most people might think of it as a spice that exists in the realm of desserts, it makes for a delicious accompaniment to the savoriness of the chicken. It'll go especially well when paired with something like dried chile (or, even better, some dark, chocolatey, ancho chile) which will bring heat and umami to lift the cinnamon's natural flavors.

There are also a great number of more uncommon spices that you can use to really impress your dinner party guests, such as sumac, for a lemony, earthy infusion, or ajwain seed, for an Italian-inspired flavor upgrade. Both of these will contrast nicely with those sweeter, warmer spices like cinnamon, cloves, or anise, bringing out that sweetness and making for a balanced, well thought out dish that makes for a surprisingly easy meal. Of course, your guests don't need to know just how easy it was to make ... they'll just be impressed by how delicious it is!