Slow Roasted Garlic and Lemon Chicken

This is one of those recipes you just can't make once: that's to say, after the first time, you're hooked. 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. I got the idea of it from those long-cooked French chicken casseroles with whole garlic cloves and just wanted to spritz it up with lemon for summer. 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.

1 chicken (approx. 2.25kg / 4½lbs) cut into 10 pieces

1 bulb of garlic (separated into unpeeled cloves)

2 unwaxed lemons (preferably thin-skinned) - cut into chunky eighths

1 handful fresh thyme

3 tablespoons olive oil

150 millilitres white wine

black pepper

1 teaspoon Maldon sea salt flakes or ½ teaspoon fine flowing salt

1 head of garlic (separated into unpeeled cloves)

1 handful fresh thyme

3 tablespoons olive oil

⅔ cup white wine

black pepper

1 teaspoon kosher salt or ½ teaspoon fine flowing salt

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 160°C/140°C Fan/gas mark 3/325ºF.

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 2 hours.

Remove the foil from the roasting tin, and turn up the oven to 200°C/180°C Fan/gas mark 6/400ºF. 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.

I like to serve this as it is, straight from the roasting tin: so just strew with your remaining thyme and dole out.

Additional Information

MAKE AHEAD / STORE: Leftover chicken will keep in the fridge, covered, for up to 3 days. Transfer leftovers to the fridge as soon as possible and within 2 hours of cooking. Eat cold.