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| This recipe, earlier this afternoon |
Based loosely around an apocryphal story I once heard about someone roasting a chicken with several bulbs of garlic inside, and an actual traditional French recipe - quite literally called poulet rôti avec 40 gousses d'ail. A lot smoother and milder than it sounds, the sauce created by slowly cooking the garlic in white wine is truly astonishing. The chicken won’t be at all dry, and slow-cooking the garlic in this way also means you can enjoy all the rich flavour of roast garlic without getting garlic breath!
Serves 4.
Ingredients
- One large chicken
- Roughly 40 cloves of garlic – that’s around two large bulbs
- Half a lemon
- A couple of sticks of celery
- A spoonful each of dried thyme and rosemary
- Optional: fresh parsley
- Olive oil
- 250ml white wine – I used an Argentinian Pinot Grigio but I guess the recipe works best with proper French wine!
- Dijon mustard
In a small bowl, mix together a teaspoonful each of thyme and rosemary. Add a dash of olive oil and season with salt and pepper.
Prick the chicken vigorously all over with a fork and massage the olive oil mixture well into the chicken’s skin.
Take the first bulb of garlic, whole. Turn it onto its side and slice it in half in one clean motion. Pick the cloves apart; there’s no need to peel the garlic meticulously, but you should remove the biggest bits of the papery skin as these could burn inside the chicken.
Now stuff the chicken, first with the half lemon and then with all the garlic halves. Break the celery sticks in half and push them into the chicken cavity before placing the chicken into a lidded cooking pot. Always wash your hands well after handling raw chicken.
Peel all of the remaining garlic and scatter the cloves, whole, around the chicken before adding the wine. Cook for an hour with the lid on, then another half hour with the lid off in order to brown. The chicken is cooked when the juices run clear; if any of the meat still looks pink you can always give it another ten minutes, but put the lid back on to prevent the bird from drying out.
Your house will shortly smell of garlic.
When cooked, remove the chicken from the pot and wrap it in foil, leaving behind the rich jus, which should have approximately 20 peeled cloves of garlic bobbing about in it! Add a teaspoonful of Dijon mustard and blend the jus with a hand blender to make a rich and velvety sauce. Taste and add further salt, pepper and some finely chopped parsley if desired.
Serve portions of the chicken with seasonal vegetables and generous helpings of the garlic sauce. If you can recover any of the halved pieces of the garlic from inside the chicken, squeeze them gently to remove the skin and serve alongside.
Your house will still smell of garlic. Your breath, miraculously, won't!
