[zeveb]

> However, I have a family, a full time job, my wife has a full time job, and we can't always allocate the time to roast a chicken.

I'm in the same boat you are, but reading it put like that ('we can't always allocate the time to roast a chicken') kinda puts it in perspective. That's terrible, for you and for me alike. 'Doesn't have time to cook a bird' sounds awful, and is.

[dekhn]

Specifically, I mean: after I come home from work/picking up kids, there isn't really time to cook a chicken. Normally, I plan for this on the weekends by using my free time to cook items that can be reheated. For example, precook rice, some casserole. Veggies can be prepped from raw in ~5 minutes using a microwave. However, by the end of the week, people are tired of leftovers, so the convenience of being able to get a precooked chicken provides real value.

Note that rotisserie chicken isn't just a cooked chicken. It's been brined for many hours (it takes time to prep the brine, then dry the chicken after brining), which makes the meat moist, it's been roasted evenly on all sides (hard to do without a rotating axle), and placed into a convenient container.

It seems totally reasonable to swap the time to make an item that is pretty hard to reproduce at home (I don't want to manage a rotisserie or do brining on a regular basis).

[munificent]

> It's been brined for many hours (it takes time to prep the brine, then dry the chicken after brining), which makes the meat moist

For what it's worth, there are a number of simple recipes for roasting chicken that don't require brining or any long marinating period but still come out nice and moist.

Even a basic roast will be fine as long as you don't overcook it.

[dekhn]

Ah, but it's not that simple. A chicken is not a spherical piece of uniform meat. Getting the temp right and pulling the chicken at the right time (so that the legs are fully cooked while the breast is not) isn't really easy. Techniques like spatchcocking make this easier, but it all trades off time and convnience.

Ultimately, however, brining has outright phenomenal effects on meat tenderness and moisture that simple cannot be replicated by timing and temperature changes. It creates complex chemical changes in the muscle that lead to a far simpler cooking process, and the meat also stays moister longer than cooking. This is covered in detail in cooking chemistry books.

See, for example: http://modernistcuisine.com/recipes/injection-brining/

"Yet the perfect roast chicken is nearly impossible to achieve in practice. The temperature required to brown and crisp the skin is so high that it leaves the meat underneath scorched and dry. The dark thigh and leg meat similarly need higher heat than is ideal for the white breast meat. Brining the chicken in salt water can help the delicate breast meat retain more juice at higher temperatures, but the brine has the same effect on the skin, which then ends up unpleasantly chewy."

This is basically scientific fact: you cannot achieve what you want without brining without putting in effort and time.

[munificent]

> Getting the temp right and pulling the chicken at the right time (so that the legs are fully cooked while the breast is not) isn't really easy.

It's not trivial, but I think it's pretty easy after you've done it a couple of times.

> Techniques like spatchcocking make this easier, but it all trades off time and convenience.

Right. I do something similar, though I cut the legs all the way off. It takes a couple of minutes, but it's pretty simple.