Getting more lemon flavour into a roast chicken
For a long time, I’ve often cut a lemon in half and stuffed into the cavity of a chicken before roasting. Too often, I’ve wondered why I’ve bothered. Sure, the juice evaporates and keeps the meat nice and moist, but what happened to the lemon flavour?
Squeezing the lemon and rubbing in into the skin before seasoning and drizzling with olive oil is a good answer to the flavour problem, but these days, in the cause to losing weight, I don’t eat the skin!
The answer came partially from a recipe in Jamie Oliver’s book Jamie’s Dinners, where he drops the lemon into the water he’s parboiling his roast potatoes in. He then punctures the fruit and pops it into the fowl.
It’s great. Lots of lemon flavour permeates the flesh. Problem solved.
My twist on this is to pierce a lemon plenty of times with the point of a paring knife, then put it in the microwave for about a minute at full power – just long enough to get the lemon and its juices nice and hot, without boiling the juices off.
That way, you can have a nice lemony chicken when you’re not serving roast potatoes.