There are so many ways to do a Sunday roast, you could make a new recipe every week to delicious results.
But Nigella Lawson has a roast recipe so moreish she promises you’ll want to make it again and again.
To make things even more tempting, the chicken is slow cooked, so it’s hands off and “gloriously easy” to get a roast on the table.
Two lemons are thinly sliced and cooked to caramelisation, with garlic and thyme also infusing the chicken with a wonderful flavour.
Tangy lemon and honeyed garlic are the major flavours here and your home will smell all the better for it.
In her recipe notes, Nigella shares her inspiration was old school French chicken casseroles made with whole garlic cloves.
“This is one of those recipes you just can’t make once: that’s to say, after the first time, you’re hooked,” she writes.
“It is gloriously easy: you just put everything in the roasting dish and leave it to cook in the oven, pervading the house, at any time of year, with the summer scent of lemon and thyme — and of course, mellow, almost honeyed garlic.
“The wonderful thing about it is that you turn the lemon from being a flavouring to being a major player; left in chunks to cook slowly in the oven they seem almost to caramelise and you can eat them, skin, pith and all, their sour bitterness sweetened in the heat.”
All you’ll need to do to get it going is combine the ingredients, cover with foil and cook at a “flavour-intensifyingly” low heat. Two hours later, you’ll want to eat it straight out of the roasting tin.
Slow roasted garlic and lemon chicken
This recipe serves four to six people.
Ingredients
One chicken (approx. 2.25kg / 4½lbs) cut into 10 pieces
One bulb of garlic (separated into unpeeled cloves)
Two unwaxed lemons (preferably thin-skinned) – cut into chunky eighths
One handful fresh thyme
Three tablespoons olive oil
150 millilitres white wine
black pepper
One teaspoon Maldon sea salt flakes or ½ teaspoon fine flowing salt
Method
Pre-heat the oven to 160C/140C Fan/gas mark 3/325F.
Put the chicken pieces into a roasting tin and add the garlic cloves, lemon chunks and the thyme; just roughly pull the leaves off the stalks, leaving some intact for strewing over later.
Add the oil and using your hands mix everything together, then spread the mixture out, making sure all the chicken pieces are skin side up.
Sprinkle over the white wine and grind on some pepper and sprinkle over the sea salt flakes, then cover tightly with foil and put in the oven to cook, at flavour-intensifyingly low heat, for two hours.
Remove the foil from the roasting tin, and turn up the oven to 200C/180C Fan/gas mark 6/400F.
Cook the uncovered chicken for another 30-45 minutes, by which time the skin on the meat will have turned golden brown and the lemons will have begun to scorch and caramelise at the edges.
Nigella said she likes to serve this as it is, straight from the roasting tin: so just strew with your remaining thyme and dole out.
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