- 2 hours +
- Easy
- Italian
- Serves 4
Your oven is the workhorse of your kitchen. Put it on and let it cook while you keep yourself busy with other things or just put your feet up and relax. Chicken cooked for three or four hours until golden on the outside and impossibly tender in the middle - forget fancy sous vide machines, all you need for slow cooking is already built into your kitchen. If you don't like anchovies, you'll still love the salty-savoury flavour they bring to a classic roast chicken (the kids won't even know they're there).
Ingredients
3 large brown onions, cut into wedges
1 free-range chicken (about 1.7kg)
6 anchovy fillets, finely chopped
1 tbsp capers, roughly chopped
100g butter, softened
1⁄4 tsp salt
1 lemon, cut into wedges
2 tbsp parsley
Method
1. Heat your oven to 150C.
2. Cover the base of a heavy roasting pan with the onion.
3. Cut a couple of deep slits into the drumstick of the chicken to sever the long tendons that run along the drumsticks.
4. Mix together the chopped anchovies, capers and butter and rub all over the chicken, inside and out.
5. Squeeze over the lemon and place the squeezed wedges into the chicken cavity. Season the chicken with the salt and place it on top of the onion.
6. Roast the chicken for three hours (basting with the pan juices a few times during the cooking process), then remove the chicken and rest for 15 minutes. If the skin of the chicken needs a little more browning, increase the heat of the oven to 220C and return the chicken to the top of the onions to cook for a further 5-10 minutes until the skin is well browned.
7. Serve the chicken immediately, scattered with parsley along with the buttery caramelised onions.
Adam's tip
Use a separate oven thermometer to check your oven temperatures. The true internal temperature of many domestic ovens can vary by as much as 200C from what's indicated on the dial.
