When I was in high school, one of my best friends, the Violist, had an ongoing struggle with artichokes.
She loved them, and whenever they featured on a menu, she wanted to order one.
“That’s nonsense,” her mother would say. “We can make them just as easily at home.”
I understand this rationale: I am staunchly against ordering things I frequently make at home–pasta with tomato sauce, salad with gorgonzola and pears, tuna sandwiches. I always order something new and different and reserve these dishes for my own kitchen and the much lower grocery store prices.
The only problem for the Violist was that the promised artichokes never graced her plate–once at home, her mother found them too complicated to put together, and my friend was left without the culinary bliss that is a perfectly cooked artichoke with a side of hollandaise sauce.
One of the dishes I have relegated to an only-at-home dish is roast chicken, but not because I find it prosaic, as the Violist’s mother found artichokes. Rather, I’ve found that the only person who can make perfect roast chicken with juicy white meat, perfectly cooked dark meat, a crisp and flavorful exterior and not a centimeter of greasy, flabby skin is my mother.
This recipe is one she has been making for years. She discovered that the secret was the pizza oven that she had commissioned a few years ago–now, we use it for much more than perfectly blistered pizzas: we also make roasted vegetables, steak tenderloin and, of course, chicken.
The recipe doesn’t have exact measures–I’m lucky I managed to get her to write a list of the ingredients on a Post-It. But you really can’t go wrong with garlic, lemon juice and olive oil, and I promise that even if the measurements are a bit approximate, the chicken is always out of this world.
Roasted Lemon and Herb Chicken
2 whole fryers, split (you can ask your butcher to do this for you, or you can do it yourself: with the chicken breast-side down, use poultry shears to cut out the backbone, and the chicken will lie flat)
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup lemon juice
zest from lemons
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
freshly ground black pepper
red pepper flakes, to taste
salt
a hefty handful of Italian parsley, chopped
2 bricks covered in aluminum foil
In a bowl, combine the oil, lemon juice and zest, garlic and red and black peppers. Place the chicken in a glass dish, and douse with about half the marinade. Salt the chicken and cover with plastic and refrigerate. Allow to sit for at least three hours and up to a day.
Cook the chicken in a pizza oven (or on the grill): remove from the marinade, allowing the excess to drip off. Grill bone-side down for 20 minutes, then flip and grill skin-side down for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, mix the parsley into the reserved marinade.
Remove chicken from grill and brush immediately with excess marinade.