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Delicious! 🍅🫒

My slices came out golden and glossy rather than blackened, and that is the one thing I would change.

Oiling the bread and cooking it in an oiled pan is not toasting, it is shallow frying. You get an even biscuit colour with no bitterness anywhere in it.

The bread here is supposed to be scorched. Black edges, dark stripes, further than feels comfortable.

Sweet tomato, grassy oil, raw garlic and basil are all on one side of the scale. The only thing balancing them is carbon.

Great recipe!

Italian Baked Chicken and Potatoes

Look at how evenly everything on that plate has browned, front to back. That is the one instruction in this recipe worth stealing for everything else you roast, and it takes four seconds. Halfway through, you turn the potatoes over and you also rotate the whole pan. Those are two different fixes for two different problems and most people only ever do the first. Turning the potatoes solves top against bottom. Rotating the pan solves back against front, because a home oven is not evenly hot and never has been. The heating element sits at the back and the door leaks heat every time you open it, so the far side of your pan is running hotter than the near side for the entire forty five minutes. Over that long, the difference is the gap between deep golden and disappointingly pale, in the same dish, on the same tray. One half turn and it disappears.

INGREDIENTS

1 1/2 lb chicken thighs
1 lb baby potatoes
5 or 6 garlic cloves
4 oz pitted green olives
1 lemon, quartered
4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp dried oregano
2 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cracked black pepper
Juice of 1 lemon

DIRECTIONS

1. Whisk the oil, lemon juice, oregano, thyme, salt and pepper together.
2. Heat the oven to 375F.
3. Dry the chicken thoroughly with paper towels.
4. Arrange it skin side up in a paper lined baking dish.
5. Add the potatoes, garlic cloves, olives and lemon quarters around it.
6. Drizzle the dressing over everything.
7. Bake 45 minutes, turning the potatoes and rotating the pan halfway.
8. Broil 2 minutes for extra colour.
9. Rest 10 minutes, toss everything in the pan juices, and serve.

1 hour 12 minutes, serves 4.

5 HELPFUL TIPS

1. Dress the potatoes generously and the skin barely at all.
Once the chicken is dry, rub only a thin film of the dressing into the skin and spoon the rest over the potatoes and olives. Anything pooling on top of the skin sits there instead of browning.

2. The olives do more than the recipe admits.
They appear in the ingredient list and nowhere else, which is a shame, because roasting whole green olives for three quarters of an hour wrinkles them, concentrates them, and lets their brine into the pan juices. Leave them out and the dish is noticeably plainer.

3. The lemon quarters are in there for the peel, not the juice.
Forty five minutes of dry heat draws the oil out of the rind into the fat in the pan, and softens the pith past the point where it tastes bitter. That is a completely different thing from the juice you already put in the dressing. Squeeze them over at the table if you like, or leave them.

4. Cut every potato so it has a flat face, and lay that face down.
A flat surface sitting against a hot pan browns. A curved one touches in one spot and steams everywhere else. Halve the small ones and quarter anything bigger.

5. Parmigiano in the last ten minutes only.
That is what you can see grated over mine, and it is the author's own variation rather than the base recipe. Put it on at the start and it will be dark and bitter long before the chicken hits temperature.

NUTRITION

Per serving: 456 calories, 23 g carbohydrates, 39 g protein, 23 g fat, 1229 mg sodium, 1156 mg potassium, 4 g fiber, 1 g sugar, 65 mg calcium, 2 mg iron.



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