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Roasted coconut chicken
Serves 4 Starters and mains
Ingredients
- 1.5kg whole chicken
- 1tbsp tamarind paste
- 2tbsp oil
- 1 x 400ml can full-fat coconut milk
- 2tsp gula jawa (dark palm sugar)
For the bumbu spice paste
- 2 onions, roughly chopped
- 4 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
- 2 large red chillies, half seeded and chopped
- 2 lemongrass sticks, trimmed and sliced
- 4cm piece turmeric, peeled, or 1tsp ground turmeric
- 1tsp ground coriander
- 1tsp salt
Method
Find a roasting dish in which the chicken sits reasonably snugly, with just a little room around the edges to hold the sauce. Put the bird inside and paint the skin with tamarind paste. Leave to come up to room temperature while you make the bumbu.
Blitz all the bumbu ingredients to a paste in a food processor. Heat the oil in a pan and cook the bumbu for 5-10 minutes, stirring often, until the rawness has been replaced with fragrance.
Paint the chicken all over with some of the bumbu, adding a spoonful inside the cavity. Keep the rest of the bumbu in the pan.
Preheat the oven to 190C/ 170C Fan/Gas 5. Add the coconut milk and palm sugar to the excess bumbu in the pan. Bring up to the boil and simmer for around 5 minutes, stirring all the time. Pour over the chicken.
Roast for 1 hour, or until the chicken is golden and when you stick a knife between the leg and breast, it is just the palest pink (it will finish cooking as it rests). Baste with the coconutty juices occasionally as the chicken cooks to help keep it succulent.
Remove the chicken from the dish and rest it somewhere warm for 20 minutes. Spoon off and discard the oil from the roasting dish. Serve the rest with the chicken.
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