I'm gonna cook lemon tzatziki chicken with sweet jammy onions and crispy lemon rice,
all with a clever Greek-inspired twist.
I want you to do a simple preparation on the chicken. Just
run your knife down the back of the chicken.
And push it open like a book. The leg meat takes a bit more time to cook than the breast so you
can kind of help even that up by taking the leg and just simply scoring down to the bone.
3 scores is really going to let the marinade in. I will use the tzatziki traditionally,
I will, but half of it I won't. And I'm going to take half of that tzatziki, put it in this bowl,
add just a little more olive oil and a little hit more of lemon juice. Let's think about what is in
tzatziki: dried mint, cucumber, garlic, yogurt. Yogurt is one of the very best tenderisers of
meat and it allows the meat to absorb flavour, so this will make the most fantastic marinade.
Rub that all over the chicken, get your hands in there, all the little cracks and crannies.
I'm not cooking a Greek dish, I'm cooking a Greek-inspired dish.
In a perfect world I would marinate that overnight. If you just do it for a couple
of hours, happy days, and even if you want to just do it for like half an hour that's good as well.
So I've got a large pan on a medium heat. I'll add some olive oil to the pan.
And the chicken is ready to go. Give that a nice seasoning
of salt. Turn the heat up and put it skin side down in the pan.
Of course chicken skin goes crispy, with yogurt on it what's gonna happen is you're going to get
little burnt bits, little charred bits. So about 5 minutes maybe a little bit less of
frying. What I want to do now is have like a trivet for that chicken right,
something for it to cook into. So I'm going to use onions, just 4 onions. One half of a red onion
I'm going to put to one side, now let's think about how we've seen onions used over the last
few days. We've seen onions stuffed with rice, we've seen onions slow cooked, and as little
sprinkles on mezze. So once we've quartered the onions I just want to kind of unclick them into
beautiful little petals. So look I think this idea of a few ingredients working hard, simplicity,
that's very very Mediterranean. You don't have to throw everything at dishes if you've got
lovely ingredients. So this chicken has had 2 or 3 minutes and I want it to be just lightly golden,
look at that. So onions go in, and then that becomes the base for cooking the chicken. And
that's not the end of the story because I'm going to use the lemon when these are
roasted. The flavour of lemon that you get is completely different than fresh. We've got it
in the marinade, we've got it roasted, and then I'm going to do a little pickle with the onions
later. So lemon lemon lemon, fresh fresh fresh. This is going to cook in the oven for 1 hour
at 200 degrees Celsius which is 400 Fahrenheit. And now I've got an hour to soak up all of this.
Whoo!
Look what we've got you can see the flavour sticking to the chicken, like you can see how
tender the wing meat is. I'm going to use that beautiful classic tzatziki to save the resting
juices from that chicken. So just use this to make like a little reservoir. If I squeeze this lemon
you get juice, juice, pulp pulp, jam jam jam, I mean it's like an eruption of lemony-ness.
That is the islands right? I'll nick y'know just a little lemon. Give or take half the onions.
And then the other half I'm going to use to really whoop rice up, flavourwise.
So the chicken is resting in a beautiful way, back in the pan we're going to turn
the heat up. Alright this is going to be extraordinary. This local rice is plumper,
a bit more round, starchy, it's really really nice but it works really well with basmati rice.
And I'm going to fill up a mug, twice. It's going to start toasting in that lovely chicken,
fat and juices. And you're gonna do 2 to 1 rice to water, and it's perfect every time.
You'll hear it, so bubbling now, and then it will start sizzling and that's potential crispy bottom,
and who doesn't love a crispy bottom? Okay this leftover lemon skin, run your knife through it.
Just make it a little bit finer.
You can see that change now and you can scrape off any of the crispy bits from the bottom.
I'm not going to touch it again.
Turn it down and just let that tick away for 5 minutes. There's one last flourish
that I'm gonna do. That little random bit of half onion that I had, I'm just gonna finely chop it.
So to do a quick pickle couldn't be easier, a nice little pinch of salt. And I'm just going
to squeeze this lemon through my hands to catch any pips. And it goes from being like pongy onion
to like crunchy and just kind of sweeter and then I just sprinkle it from a height like this.
So it's a nice little tip. So have a little listen to this.
If we're lucky we've got golden crispy bottom along with kind of like creamy soft rice.
Ohhh yes! I'm well chuffed with that. Let's plate this up, and have a little moment.
Gorgeous lemony rice. That beautiful classic tzatziki, hot gnarly chicken,
crispiness, look at that! Right, time to enjoy.
The yogurt has still allowed the skin to be crispy but it's made those key flavours,
the garlic the lemon the mint, kind of cling on and get into the chicken. Mm!
This is heavenly.