Bryan Martin: How to cook a roast chicken like Heston Blumenthal

It's always a sad day when you lose one of your flock. I've been keeping chickens now for well over 10 years and sort of feel like their father protector, so having one pass away can be quite a sad occasion.

However, I know that she had a happy and relatively long life - hard to tell really, they all look the same but she was at least four years old and quite possibly older. Well I'm hoping, that it was a happy life, her quiet death, in her coop, surrounded by her mates seemed like a nice way to go. In chicken world there are other ways of departing that will send a chill down your spine: Like being hung upside down, electrocuted and beheaded.

So what do I do now? Bury, bin, incinerate or cook? Hard decision really - I have cooked a deceased goose, but she was drowned in her prime by her two suitors so in the end, boiling water to remove the down was an easy decision. Chickens on the other hand, seem so much closer to the family and have worked so hard, laying those beautiful eggs, scratching around the garden, doing that weird little dance they do when you get close to them. They just feel more like pets, so I gave her a quiet burial and ordered some more from the rural centre.

These super frosts we have been having certainly curtailed the rest of the flock's egg laying. It's like they made a group decision where the chook at the top of the pecking order says "Na, you try pushing out a 90 gram egg at five below freezing", so I've had to re-enter the egg buying market for the first time in a long while. Have to say, people, it's a maze out there.

Firstly, what they call large or extra-large, are in fact nothing compared to a real farm egg. I think the reason for this is that in commercial situations, once the hen stops laying an egg a day they are ejected to whatever fate that might be. You do notice that, as they age, the eggs are less frequent but larger.

Then you have to unravel supermarket egg terminology - free range, cage, barn laid, organic, eco, natural, omega-3 and even something called "environmental caged eggs". Without wading into the debate about caged birds, you don't need to spend too much time on the internet to realise that there are not many good news stories involving chickens in cages.

Same as buying one to eat, all this talk has got me wanting to roast a chook, what do you choose? There is less information here but still the terminology doesn't really convey whether the chickens were happy and didn't spend their last minutes on this earth hazily looking upside-down at rotating knives.

All I can say is buy the best you can, free-range, RSPCA approved, organic, spend as much money as you can. If you have to eat a chicken we should be encouraging best practice growing, you'll have a better feed knowing that the chicken had a longer and happier life.

OK, everyone up for a chicken recipe now? What you are after is a chook weighing around 2kg at least, I'm happy with the Inglewood certified organic brand. Their website has a few vague areas like in their FAQ area the question of "how much room do they have?" is answered with "an adequate industry best amount of space".

Didn't answer the question, but they seem to care and the chickens do have a full-on chicken flavour and aren't abnormally breasted like some other chooks on sale.

To cook, I've tried them many ways but there's none better than how Heston Blumenthal suggests. This technique requires an accurate measure of temperature, so buy an oven thermometer; it'll put your mind at ease. Firstly you should brine the chicken for a few hours. An 8 per cent salt solution will do it, but adding some spice, herbs and flavour to the brine will carry through to the cooked chook. Also, if you have the time, and I'm suggesting you should, leaving the chicken, post-brining, to dry out in the fridge overnight will add an extra dimension to the crispiness.

So enjoy a good, old-fashioned roast chicken with the knowledge that this bird did enjoy its brief life.

Roast chicken

1 large, happy chicken
2l salt brine, see below
2 lemons
1 bunch tarragon
4 cloves garlic
100g butter, soft but not melted

Soak the chicken in the cooled brine for at least one hour but not longer than four hours. Rinse well and dry inside and out. Place on a large plate and leave overnight, uncovered in the fridge.

Heat the oven to 90C, squeeze out the lemon juice and wedge the lemon skin, garlic and herbs inside the bird. Secure this opening with a skewer. Rub with half the butter and bake for four to five hours. Check the internal temperature of the chicken at the thickest part, it should read 70C. Remove from oven, turn temperature up to 200C. Drain any liquid that has formed inside the chicken and place on a flat tray. Once the oven is up to temperature, rub the chicken with the rest of the butter and roast for another 20 minutes until golden and crispy.

Lemon salt brine

2 lemons, halved
160g salt
1 head garlic, halved
1 bunch thyme
2 tbsp coriander seed
1 tbsp black peppercorns
10 juniper berries, crushed

Bring one litre of water to the boil, add the all the ingredients and let the water return to the boil and turn off. Steep for half an hour, squeeze out the lemon's juice and add another litre of cold water and chill before use.

Bryan Martin is the winemaker at Clonakilla and Ravensworth.