Whenever I would stumble upon a recipe containing words such as preheat, 350F or bake, I would either close the cookbook or browser or move on to the next recipe where such words are not necessary.

But I can’t go on forever like that so I decided to buy for myself a brand spanking new oven.

I’m not sure what kind of oven it is as I’m not so versed with the baking vocabulary but it has a rotisserie (for the famous rotisserie chicken) and the temperature settings could go up to 250C so it could be used for any ordinary patisserie baking. Now I wonder, what if the French invented the pansit and made so many variants, would they have also invented the word panssiterie?

Anyway, my first attempt of putting this oven to good use is by roasting a chicken, Filipino style. I’m not sure how the original Filipino oven roasted chicken is being done but here’s how I made mine.

I placed the whole chicken on a tight-sealed container, put about two cups lemon soda (Sprite) and poured water until the liquid covers half of the chicken. Refrigerated it overnight (about six hours), turned the chicken over in the morning and left it again to refrigerate while I’m at work (another nine hours). When I got back home from work, I discarded the liquid marinade and made another batch out of chopped garlic, onion and ginger, juice from one lemon, half cup soy sauce, 2 table spoons sugar and a tablespoon of freshly cracked black peppercorn. I let the chicken marinate for another hour just to let the chicken absorb the new flavor.

Next, I stuffed the chicken cavity with a bunch of spring onion leaves along with all the solids from the marinade and baked it in the over for 30 minutes (preheated to 350F, yay!). I took out the chicken from the oven, applied with the remaining marinate and let it bake again for another 40 minutes. That’s a lot of baking but from what the cookbooks and food blogs are saying, roasted chicken is usually done in about an hour and twenty minutes but I had to stop baking as the skin of the chicken was already cracking. See, I saved a good ten minutes.

The chicken turned out great. The skin tasted better than any Andok’s or Baliwag chicken but the meat could absorb more flavor. Perhaps I could have lessened the water and soda marinating time and increased the time for the second marinate or skipped the first one altogether.