Crispy Roast Chicken with Butter and Lemon
The simplest way to stop chicken breast ever coming out dry again. The butter keeps it juicy, the coarse salt builds a golden crust, and the lemon at the end lifts the whole thing. Five ingredients and the oven does the rest.
The butter is melted in the dish before the chicken goes in, not spread on cold. That way both sides are coated from the first minute instead of one side sitting in a hard lump.
And the lemon goes on after the oven, never before. Roasted for fifty minutes its juice turns bitter; added at the end it stays bright.
Ingredients
- 2 chicken breasts
- 30 g butter
- Coarse salt, as needed
- Extra virgin olive oil, as needed
- Lemon juice, to taste
Method
- 1
Preheat the oven to medium-high.
- 2
Put the 30 g of butter in a Pyrex dish and set it in the oven for a few minutes, until melted and liquid.
- 3
Put the 2 breasts in the dish, coating them well with the liquid butter on both sides. Season generously with coarse salt.
- 4
Bake for 20 minutes. Take out the dish, cut each breast into 4 pieces and add a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil over them.
- 5
Return to the oven for another 15 minutes. Turn the pieces over, making sure every side is coated in the butter and oil.
- 6
Cook for a final 15 minutes (50 minutes total) until the chicken is cooked through and golden. Out of the oven, add the lemon juice — after the heat, never before, or it turns bitter — and serve immediately.
Chicken
Chicken is the wild card of everyday cooking: it stretches, it is cheap and it takes almost any technique. These are the recipes where it stops being a fallback and becomes the dish — stuffed, pan-fried, braised, with sauces built to keep it juicy instead of dry.
