Jamie Olivers Roast Chicken With Lemon Recipe - A Review
I recently tried Jamie Oliver's Roast Chicken With Lemon and Rosemary Roast Potatoes recipe. It is freely available on his website and is easy to follow.
Without going into the full details, the recipe involves rubbing a chicken in salt and pepper a few hours before cooking, stuffing it with lemon and thyme, and roasting the potatoes around the base of the chicken to let them soak up all the flavour.
I have cooked this recipe twice for my friends and family, and both times it has been a great hit.
The skin of the chicken is dried out by the salt to make it crispy, and made flavoursome with the pepper.
The flesh of the bird is made moist by the lemon, which steams the meat from the inside.
When parboiled, the potatoes are boiled along with lemon and garlic, giving them added flavour. Before roasting, they are also tossed around with rosemary.
All of the above features make this one of my favourite roast chicken recipes. However, as with all good things there is still room for improvement.
The underside of the chicken, having soaked in lemon juice, was a bit soggy and had too much lemon flavour. I am not sure whether or not this is a feature of the recipe, or a mistake that I made.
Perhaps my oven temperature was too low. I have a weak oven and am not convinced that it's really preheated when it tells me it is.
Also, when removing the chicken from the roasting tray, I noticed that the cavity contained a lot of liquid, and that the area immediately beneath it was full of juice. This meant that some of the potatoes too close to the chicken weren't crispy. So a possibility is that the lemon released too much lemon. Next time I use this recipe I might try squeezing some of the juice out of the lemon in order to address the excess liquid issue.
Another way to address the soggy base of the chicken might be to elevate it above the tray, so that the juices can drip away. The first idea that comes to my mind for fixing this would be to place the chicken directly on top of the potatoes. However, that might cause the potatoes under the bird to become soggy if the juices are allowed to accumulate there. I don't really want to constantly move the potatoes around as that would lower the temperature of my oven as I open and close it.
The best idea I can currently think of is to elevate the chicken above the base of the tin (using a rack, or maybe vegetables), scooping the juices out halfway through cooking, and then cooking the potatoes in a separate oven after mixing them with the delicious chicken juices.
Without going into the full details, the recipe involves rubbing a chicken in salt and pepper a few hours before cooking, stuffing it with lemon and thyme, and roasting the potatoes around the base of the chicken to let them soak up all the flavour.
I have cooked this recipe twice for my friends and family, and both times it has been a great hit.
The skin of the chicken is dried out by the salt to make it crispy, and made flavoursome with the pepper.
The flesh of the bird is made moist by the lemon, which steams the meat from the inside.
When parboiled, the potatoes are boiled along with lemon and garlic, giving them added flavour. Before roasting, they are also tossed around with rosemary.
All of the above features make this one of my favourite roast chicken recipes. However, as with all good things there is still room for improvement.
The underside of the chicken, having soaked in lemon juice, was a bit soggy and had too much lemon flavour. I am not sure whether or not this is a feature of the recipe, or a mistake that I made.
Perhaps my oven temperature was too low. I have a weak oven and am not convinced that it's really preheated when it tells me it is.
Also, when removing the chicken from the roasting tray, I noticed that the cavity contained a lot of liquid, and that the area immediately beneath it was full of juice. This meant that some of the potatoes too close to the chicken weren't crispy. So a possibility is that the lemon released too much lemon. Next time I use this recipe I might try squeezing some of the juice out of the lemon in order to address the excess liquid issue.
Another way to address the soggy base of the chicken might be to elevate it above the tray, so that the juices can drip away. The first idea that comes to my mind for fixing this would be to place the chicken directly on top of the potatoes. However, that might cause the potatoes under the bird to become soggy if the juices are allowed to accumulate there. I don't really want to constantly move the potatoes around as that would lower the temperature of my oven as I open and close it.
The best idea I can currently think of is to elevate the chicken above the base of the tin (using a rack, or maybe vegetables), scooping the juices out halfway through cooking, and then cooking the potatoes in a separate oven after mixing them with the delicious chicken juices.
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