Nigella Lawson's garlic lemon roast chicken recipe 'so good you'll make it again'

Nigella Lawson has a roast chicken that you'll want to make again and again. The two lemons are thinly sliced and cooked to caramelisation, with garlic and thyme infusing the chicken

There are countless ways to prepare a Sunday roast, with the potential for a new recipe each week.

There's one Nigella Lawson has a particular roast recipe that she assures is so tasty, she says you won't make just once. Adding to its appeal, the chicken is slow-cooked, making it "gloriously easy" to serve a roast.

The recipe involves thinly slicing two lemons and caramelising them, while also infusing the chicken with garlic and thyme. The star flavours here are tangy lemon and sweet garlic, which will fill your home with an amazing aroma.

Nigella's inspiration came from traditional French chicken casseroles made with whole garlic cloves.

"This is one of those recipes you just can't make once: that's to say, after the first time, you're hooked," she writes, reports the Express.

"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."

"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."

To prepare this dish, simply combine the ingredients, cover with foil and cook at a low heat to intensify the flavours. After two hours, you'll be tempted to eat it straight from the roasting tin.

Slow roasted garlic and lemon chicken

This recipe serves four to six people.

Ingredients

• One chicken (approx. 2.25kg / 4½lbs) cut into 10 pieces
• One bulb of garlic (separated into unpeeled cloves)
• Two unwaxed lemons (preferably thin-skinned) - cut into chunky eighths
• One handful fresh thyme
• Three tablespoons olive oil
• 150 millilitres white wine
• black pepper
• One teaspoon Maldon sea salt flakes or ½ teaspoon fine flowing salt

Method

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

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 two hours.

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

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.

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