The Kitchn: Yes, you can make a whole chicken in the slow cooker!
The slow cooker strikes again! With minimal work and just one ingredient (psst ... it's chicken) this recipe delivers the most delicious payoff imaginable: meat so tender and juicy it practically falls right off the bone. And it's all thanks to the small, closed environment of the slow cooker.
The real beauty of this recipe (yes, maybe even better than hands-off cooking!) is the ingredient list, as it contains a single item: one whole chicken. OK, you might find salt and pepper on there, too, but I like to assume those are givens in just about every recipe. And, really, if you prefer to omit them, that's fine. The result will amaze you either way.
To be honest, I'm usually a little dubious of recipes that call for just one ingredient -- with barely any input, it's hard to expect a decent output -- but I'm happy to tell you that this chicken proves that belief totally wrong. It's one of the rare times just a little bit of work leaves you with a huge reward.
Put this chicken on a pedestal -- literally
There's one important step to keep in mind before adding the chicken to the slow cooker. You want to create a base for the chicken to rest on so that it's not sitting directly on the bowl. This could be a small metal rack or trivet (like the one that came with your electric pressure cooker) or even three to four balls of aluminum foil; just enough so the chicken is raised about an inch off the bottom.
As the chicken cooks, it releases a fair amount of liquid, more so than roasting in the oven. Raising the chicken prevents it from sitting in a pool of liquid for an extended period of time and also encourages more air flow around the whole bird.
If you've got a few potatoes, carrots, or onions hanging around, go ahead and use them as a base. Over the year, sweet potatoes have become a real favorite.
Crispy skin is minutes away
While the moist environment in the slow cooker makes for seriously juicy chicken, it does have one potential drawback: Cooking a whole chicken in the slow cooker won't give you the browned, crispy skin you'd get from roasting in the oven. If you're not a skin person, then this will hardly matter to you, but if a bird wrapped in a crisp, crackly skin is what you're after, there's a simple fix for that.
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