100 Clove Garlic Confit Chicken

You spoke and we listened - 40 cloves of garlic just isn't enough. 100 cloves of garlic infused into oil and a whole chicken? Yes please.

1 hour prep

3 hours cook

Serves 4-6

Hugh Woodward

Ingredients

1 wholechicken

1 tbspflaked sea salt

100 (or so) clovesgarlic

6 sprigsthyme

2 bay leaves

6 or soblack peppercorns

500 gsalad potatoes, par boiled

a handful chopped chives

This is something we've wanted to try for a while. Why are you limited to just the legs of your chosen fowl when making duck confit? Why not the whole thing?

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Liberally salt the chicken, then find your deepest pan - something that will snuggly hold the chicken and the garlic without any part of the bird poking above the surface.

It helps to truss the chicken as during the confit process it gets very soft and could fall apart. It also keeps it nice and contained.

Place the trussed chicken along with the garlic and aromatics in the saucepan and fill with sunflower oil - in a dream world we'd use duck fat but it would cost you a fortune. Make sure the chicken is fully submerged and there are no air bubbles in the cavity.

Bring the oil to 100°C then transfer to an oven to cook for around an hour and a half, or until the chicken is very tender.

Crank up the oven to 200°C. Squeeze the garlic from its casing into a bowl and whisk or blitz to make delicious confit garlic paste. Take a splash of the cooking oil (you can use the rest for deep frying or another project after filtering it) and a roasting tin. Toss in the potatoes and carefully lift the chicken onto the tray. Roast until crispy all over - around half an hour.

Serve on a bed of confit garlic with the roast potatoes and chopped chives.