The Best Sauces to Pair With Your Roasted Chicken

Roasted chicken is one of our favorite meals to prepare. It’s easy, nourishing, and can feed a large family or provide a smaller family with leftovers for the week! Often, people shy away from preparing foods that seem difficult or intimidating to cook. Roasted chicken can be one of those meals, since pictures often show it beautifully garnished, trussed, and perfectly browned. Here’s a little secret - roasted chicken is actually one of the simplest meals you can prepare. It can definitely be dressed up with fancy marinades or brines, dry rubs or injections. The truth is, roasted chicken is delicious even when prepared very simply, without all of that extra accoutrement. It doesn’t take much more than salt, pepper, and a good cooking oil or butter to make a spectacular roasted chicken. 

If you need inspiration for your roasted chicken, check out our post about the Best Roast Chicken Recipes. Roasted chicken can be prepared in so many ways, and although it may seem a little more intimidating to cook a whole chicken rather than parts like breasts or thighs, preparing and cooking a roasted chicken is surprisingly easy. As long as you have a trusty meat thermometer, a delicious pasture raised chicken, and a few simple pantry ingredients, you can whip up a delicious and deceptively simple meal with just a little over an hour of cooking time. Our Pasturebird pasture raised chicken is so flavorful that you can make a delicious roasted chicken simply with oil/butter, salt, and pepper - but you can also kick up the flavor by pairing your roasted chicken with a savory sauce. 

If you’re looking for the best sauces to pair with your roasted chicken, the type of sauce you choose to make may depend on how confident you are in the kitchen, how much time you have to cook, or how picky your family is! Much like roasted chicken itself, a good savory sauce is deceptively easy to prepare and doesn’t have to take much time or effort to result in a delicious final product. Our cooking philosophy is usually the simpler the better, and that goes for both ingredients and difficulty. As long as it’s made with whole foods-based, nutrient dense ingredients, it’s welcome in the Pasturebird kitchen! 

We’ve included some of our favorite options below to give you some inspiration for preparing the best sauces to pair with your roasted chicken, and we’ve kept it simple - these recipes require just a few pantry staples and a few minutes of your time to prepare a delicious savory sauce.

Quick and Simple Pan Sauce

Our motivation for this recipe came from themom100.com, and while the original recipe is made with the juice from seared chicken breasts, you can easily modify it for a roast chicken recipe as well. Instead of searing chicken breasts in the pan and then building the sauce from there, you can take a few spoonfuls of the “drippings” from your roast chicken pan as the base for your pan sauce. 

Ingredients:

Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1 tablespoon olive oil

½ cup minced shallots or onions

½ cup dry white wine

1 cup chicken broth (or bone broth!)

Juice of one lemon or 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard or both

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

Instructions:

This one is so easy you don’t even really need a recipe. Simply take some liquid from your roasting pan (the chicken should be done or almost done cooking so the liquid is safe to cook with), and place it in a medium-sized saucepan. Then, add your minced shallots/onions and saute until tender. Deglaze the pan with the white wine and allow it to simmer while you scrape up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Add your broth and continue to simmer for about 5 more minutes until the sauce is slightly reduced. Lastly, add your lemon juice or mustard and butter and stir until the butter is melted. 

When your roasted chicken is finished cooking, allow it to rest for a few minutes to ensure it’s tender and juicy, and then serve and top with this delicious, simple pan sauce.

Paleo Roasted Chicken Gravy

When you’re in the mood for a comforting, home-cooked meal, it’s hard to beat a simple roasted chicken and gravy paired with homemade mashed potatoes. If you follow a paleo diet you may think that delicious savory gravy is something you need to leave in the past. Luckily, most home cooked food is easy to modify to fit a paleo lifestyle, with a few simple tweaks. 

In this recipe from 40 Aprons, drippings from roasted chicken are combined with cassava flour and chicken stock to make a simple, paleo-friendly gravy. Simply mix a few tablespoons of drippings with 3 tbsp cassava flour, and stir to form a smooth paste. Then slowly add 2.5 cups of chicken stock or bone broth, whisking constantly until combined. Season to taste with salt and fresh savory herbs of your choice and serve over roasted chicken and mashed potatoes or other sides of choice.

Lemon and Caper Pan Sauce

This sauce is simple and tangy, reminiscent of chicken piccata. Once again, the original recipe assumes that you’ve seared chicken in your pan, but you can easily adapt this to work with the drippings from a roasted chicken.

Ingredients

⅓ cup fresh lemon juice from about 2 lemons

½ cup chicken broth or bone broth

¼ cup capers

2 tablespoons butter

parsley

Instructions

Grab a few tablespoons of chicken drippings and browned bits from the bottom of your roasting pan. Heat over medium high and then add lemon juice, chicken broth and capers to your hot skillet, and reduce to about half, 3 minutes. Whisk in butter and simmer for 1 more minute, scraping up any crispy browned bits from the bottom of the pan with the spatula. This sauce is naturally thin, but can be thickened with cassava flour or your favorite thickener. It’s delicious poured over cooked roasted chicken and served with sauteed greens.