Stop Throwing Away The Juices From Your Rotisserie Chicken

If you buy a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store — as you would, since it's not like there are street carts selling the things — you'll likely find a certain amount of juice in the plastic tray once you open up the packaging (though it may have turned to jelly if you refrigerate your purchase). While you may feel that the liquid is a waste product that needs to be poured down the sink, that would be a mistake. For one thing, the fat in the juices might clog the drain, but a far bigger issue would be the fact that you'll be wasting an ingredient that could be put to good use. If you want to prevent food waste, take a tip from Jacques Pépin.

Pépin may be a chicken cooking expert in his own right (actually, there's no "may" about it), but even he will make use of a rotisserie bird if he wants to save himself some time and effort. In a video he shares with his Facebook followers, he chops a chicken into nine roughly equal pieces, then arranges them on a lettuce-lined plate. He then tops the salad with salt, pepper, lime juice, herbs, and chopped tomatoes along with a sauce made from olive oil, butter, garlic, shallots, mushrooms, salt, herbs, and the liquid from the chicken. In the words of the far-famed French chef, "There is always the juice here left in the pan ... Don't throw that out."

While Pépin's salade de poulet rôti looks merveilleuse, his mushroom-shallot sauce isn't the only way that you can repurpose the drippings from a rotisserie chicken (or even those from a chicken that you've roasted at home). One way is to do as Pépin did by using the juice as the base of a salad dressing. You need not go to such lengths as sauteing shallots and so forth, however, but can instead simply mix the drippings with a sufficient amount of vinegar or citrus juice to make a salad dressing that suits your taste.

You could also warm the juices in a pan, then stir in some flour and broth or milk to make them into a sauce or gravy. If you'll be saving the chicken bones to make stock, add the juices to the pot as well to give it a richer chicken flavor. You can also add the leftover liquid to another soup, stew, or stir-fry or mix it into cooked rice or quinoa to give those bland grains a boost.