Roast Chicken Thighs with Olives
A one-tray dinner: chicken thighs, potatoes, olives and lemon roasted together.
- Time
- 70 minutes
- Serves
- 4
- Level
- Easy
- Cuisine
- Mediterranean
A complete meal on one tray: meat, vegetables and sauce cooking at the same time, in the same heat. What makes this recipe work is the skin on the chicken thighs — the fat that renders out drips down onto the potatoes and fries them in it. That is why the vegetables go underneath the chicken; they sit not on the tray but in the chicken's fat.
The olives are a late addition, and for a technical reason: left in the oven too long they lose moisture, shrivel, and their salt concentrates until they turn bitter. Fifteen minutes is enough for them to give their aroma.
Directions
- Heat the oven to 200 °C.
- Rub the chicken with salt, pepper, paprika and two tablespoons of the olive oil; rest for 10 minutes.
- Spread the potatoes, onion and lemon slices in a wide tray; drizzle with the remaining oil and the oregano.
- Set the chicken skin-side up on the vegetables.
- Tuck the rosemary sprigs in between.
- Roast for 40 minutes, then take the tray out, add the olives and turn the vegetables once in the juices.
- Roast a further 15 minutes, until the skin is crisp.
Tips & storage
The olives go in near the end. Added at the start they dry out and turn bitter — the most critical piece of timing in this recipe.
Skin up, without exception. A thigh laid skin-down steams in its own juices; crispness only develops on top, in dry moving air.
Don't crowd the tray. Vegetables piled on top of each other cannot evaporate, so they stew instead of roasting. Use two trays if you need to.
The ten-minute rest after rubbing is not idle. In that time the salt begins moving from the surface into the meat; chicken that goes straight into the oven is seasoned only on the outside.
Eat the lemon slices or remove them. Roasted lemon slices sweeten and are edible, but if the pith is bitter, lift them out before serving.
Olives with stones are better. Pitted olives collapse in the oven; stoned ones hold their shape. Remember to warn people as you serve.
Storage. Two days in the fridge. Reheat in the oven rather than a microwave and the skin crisps again.
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