
This tray bake is an easy and cheap way to cater for a lot of people. But the real star of the tray bake is the layer of potatoes underneath the chicken — it soaks up the wine, garlic, butter, lemon, and chicken juices to become something very special.
Lemon and garlic chicken tray bake
Equipment:
1 deep sided roasting tray. The disposable tin foil roasting pans work fine, but a proper roasting tray is better.
Tin foil
Vegetable peeler
Ingredients:
Chicken portions on the bone with the skin on. I use chicken marylands (thigh + leg), which can be bought for about $3 per kilo. If using marylands, one per person is a generous serving. But make sure to throw in a few extra, because I have never cooked this without the tray getting scraped clean. DO NOT USE BREASTS — brown meat on the bone only.
1 lemon per kilo of chicken.
1 entire head of garlic per kilo of chicken.
Very cheap dry white wine (I use $5 chardonnay) (about 1.5 cups).
1 tablespoon of butter per kilo of chicken.
Salt (use good salt — I like Murray River salt flakes the best, but anything is better than iodised table salt).
Freshly ground black pepper.
Fresh herbs — fresh sage, rosemary, thyme OR dried herbs: thyme and oregano
Olive oil.
Potatoes, scrubbed but skin on — two potatoes per person, or more for greedy people (I could probably eat five or six by myself). I like red (waxy) potatoes best for this recipe.
Method:
Pre-heat oven to 160C degrees.
Oil the pan with a little olive oil.
Cut potatoes into chunks or slices. Arrange in a layer on the bottom of the pan.
Peel and roughly chop garlic. Sprinkle half over the potatoes.
Peel the zest off the lemon/s in strips (try not to get any pith). Sprinkle half over the potatoes.
Season the potatoes well with salt. Grind over lots of pepper.
Roughly chop the herbs and sprinkle over the potatoes.
Dot the potatoes with butter.
Juice half the lemon/s and sprinkle half of the juice over the potatoes.
Lay the chicken over the top of the potatoes, skin side up. Pour over the rest of of the lemon juice, and enough wine to come one inch up the side of the pan.
Sprinkle the chicken with the rest of the garlic and herbs. Tuck the remaining lemon zest in and around the chicken.
Sprinkle well with plenty of salt. Grind over a lot of pepper.
Cover the pan tightly with tin foil, and bake at 160C for about 2.5 hours.
Remove the tin foil. The chicken should be very tender and almost falling off the bone.
Turn the oven up to 220C or turn on the grill. Replace the chicken in the oven and brown the skin VERY well — it should become very crisp and golden brown. This should take 15 minutes.
The dish is now ready to serve! But it’s also quite happy to hang out in a warm oven, covered in tin foil, for an hour or two if necessary.
If there are leftover potatoes/chicken, place into a small oven-safe dish, drizzle over a little milk and heat until piping hot in the oven.










