Cooking Casebook: Chicken in Milk

Hello September, I can't believe you are here! Life has been full as usual, but I am popping in again to share one of our favourite chicken recipes. This recipe by Jamie Oliver (it's hard to go wrong when you use a JO recipe!) has the most unlikely combinations: milk and chicken. However, slowly cooking the chicken in milk, lemon zest and herbs gives you the most amazing sauce, and I especially love this recipe as it's easy and fuss-free! The kids love this, and the best thing about this dish is that it is freezer-friendly and versatile. My only issue with it is that we never had enough sauce to go around, so I've adapted the recipe in a few ways. Here's our version!

CHICKEN IN MILK

Ingredients

1 whole chicken, cleaned

2 whole garlic bulbs

1 handful of fresh sage

A few sprigs of fresh rosemary

A few sprigs of fresh thyme

2 lemons, zested

1/2 stick of cinnamon

Sea salt

Black pepper

Milk (600 ml)

Olive oil

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 190ºC.

2. Season the chicken with salt and pepper (you need to be generous with the salt).

3. Heat a small amount of olive oil in the pot. I used my Le Creuset 26 cm round French Oven, as this fits an entire chicken, and allows me to do stove to oven cooking. Fry the chicken until golden, turning to get an even colour. (Note: If you are hard-pressed for time, you can skip this step, but it helps with increasing flavour.)

4. Add the cinnamon, the sage, rosemary, and thyme leaves, lemon zest, garlic bulbs, and 500 ml of milk.

5. Cook in the oven uncovered, for 1 hour 30 minutes (or until the chicken is cooked through). At the 30 minute mark, add an additional 100 ml of milk into the pot. Bast the chicken with the milk sauce every 30 minutes.

6. Serve the chicken with the milk sauce. We love it with potatoes or pasta!

Tips:
1. This recipe is freezer friendly. To save space, shred the chicken off the bones before freezing.



2. I usually defrost the frozen batch and reheat it with the milk sauce, while adding veggies such as capsicum and corn. We serve it over freshly cooked pasta (Note: Pasta is not freezer friendly and should always be cooked fresh!). We love this with pappardelle!

PS: This post is the fourth in a series of posts written in collaboration with Le Creuset Singapore. We were sponsored products for purpose of these posts (but we purchased the larger French oven pictured in this post, before this collaboration). No monetary compensation was received.