Chicken, pineapple and ‘nduja bake

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This easy roast chicken thigh dish is all cooked on a single oven tray, and combines sweet pineapple with spicy Calabrian ‘nduja and Mexican chipotle. 

Extracted from Mezcla by Ixta Belfrage (Ebury Press, £26). All photography by Yuki Sugiura.

First published in 2022

Ingredients

Metric

Imperial

’Nduja and Chipotle Paste

Chicken

Equipment

  • Iron skillet
  • Blowtorch

Method

1

Preheat the oven to 180°C/gas mark 6

2

Put all the ingredients for the paste into a large bowl and mix together. Add the chicken, garlic and three-quarters of the sliced onion and mix well so everything is coated evenly

3

Tip the onions and garlic into a 28cm ovenproof cast-iron skillet or similar-sized baking dish and spread out. Place the chicken thighs on top, skin side up and spaced apart

4

Cut the pineapple into 4 rounds, then cut each round into quarters, removing the hard core (you should have about 300g)

5

Add the pineapple to the bowl with the remnants of the paste, mix to coat with whatever's left there, then arrange the pineapple around the chicken

6

Pour the tangerine juice around the chicken (don’t get the skin wet), then bake for 20 minutes

  • 100g of tangerine juice, (from about 4 tangerines)
7

Remove from the oven and pour the stock or water into the pan around the chicken (again, don’t get the skin wet)

  • 100g of chicken bone broth, (or stock or water)
8

Return to the oven for another 20–25 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked through and the skin is browned and crispy

9

If you have a blowtorch, use it to char the pineapple a little

10

Drizzle the cream into the sauce

  • 2 tbsp of double cream
11

Toss the coriander and the remaining sliced onions together with a tiny bit of oil and salt and arrange on top

12

Serve from the pan, with the lime wedges alongside

  • 1 lime, cut into wedges

Ixta Belfrage is an award-winning cook and food writer, who spent five years working alongside Yotam Ottolenghi at his test kitchen, before releasing her first cookbook of her own Mezcla in 2022.

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