Jamie Oliver’s easy tzatziki chicken recipe
This lemon-tzatziki chicken dish sings with Mediterranean flavour, and uses just five ingredients.
People cook very differently today in comparison to 25 years ago, when I first started – there’s just so much more we have to fit into our busy lives, and the way tech has grown around us, it has both given and taken time away.
And so, with this in mind, I’ve written another 5 Ingredients cookbook with the added va-va-voom of basing it on my experiences travelling around the Mediterranean.
This lemon-tzatziki chicken is a brilliant Greek-inspired one-pan family dish. Tzatziki makes a fantastic ready-to-go marinade – it’s not traditional to use it like this, but I can totally vouch for its deliciousness and its ability to tenderise meat.
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Tzatziki chicken
Ingredients
- 1 x 1.5kg whole chicken
- 2 x 200g tubs of tzatziki
- 2 lemons
- 4 mixed-colour (red, brown, green, white) onions
- 300g basmati rice
Method
- Use a sharp knife to carefully cut down the back of the chicken, so that you can open it out flat. Rub half the tzatziki all over the chicken with the juice of half a lemon and a good pinch of sea salt and black pepper, then cover and leave to marinate in the fridge for at least two hours, and preferably overnight.
- Preheat the oven to 180C. Peel the onions, then very finely chop half an onion and place in a bowl with the juice of half a lemon and a pinch of salt to make a pickle. Quarter the rest of the onions and place in a deep tray or ovenproof pan, then halve and add the remaining lemon. Place the chicken skin-side-up on top (it should fit snugly) and drizzle with olive oil.
- Roast for 1 hour 10 minutes, or until it’s beautifully golden and the leg meat pulls easily away from the bone. When the time’s up remove the chicken, half the roasted onions and one jammy lemon half, and reserve them.
- Using tongs, carefully squeeze the other jammy lemon half into the pan of tray juices, then cut off and discard the white pith and finely slice the skin, along with the rest of the onions.
- Put them back into the pan or tray along with the rice and 600ml of boiling salted water, then cover and cook on a medium-low heat for 12 minutes, or until tender.
- Spoon the rice into a serving dish, then place the chicken, any resting juices and the reserved roasted onions on top, and spoon over the remaining tzatziki.
- Drizzle it all with a tablespoon of extra-virgin olive oil and serve with the onion/lemon pickle and the reserved cooked lemon half for squeezing over. Serves 4
This is an edited extract from 5 Ingredients Mediterranean by Jamie Oliver