Chicken thighs and pork belly tray-roasted with cauliflower
One tray, twelve minutes of hands-on work, the oven does the rest. Fat from the chicken and the belly runs down over the cauliflower and browns it.
One portion
Against one meal out of three, at your daily targets. For fibre a full bar is the good thing; for the rest it's the opposite.
Ingredients
- 310 g Chicken thighs
- 210 g Pork belly
- 400 g Cauliflower
- 150 g Onions
- 4 pcs Garlic
- 1 pcs Lemons
- 20 g Lard
- 55 g Butter
- 20 ml Olive oil
- 6 g Smoked paprika
- 2 g Thyme
- 2 g Salt · sodium
- 1 g Black pepper
How it's made
7 stepsBig screen, one step at a time, with timers. The screen stays awake.
- Oven on at 220°C. Take the chicken out of the fridge and leave it on the counter while you prepare everything else — cold meat goes into the oven and dries out on the surface before it's cooked through.
- Melt the lard in a bowl. Tip the cauliflower straight from the freezer into the tray, no thawing. Quarter the onion, leave the garlic cloves whole, just crushed with the flat of a knife.
- Pour the melted lard over the vegetables, add the smoked paprika, thyme and pepper. Mix with your hand until every piece is glossy. Spread it all out in a single layer.Frozen cauliflower gives off water. It wants plenty of fat, a big tray and a single layer — otherwise it steams and stays soft. If the tray is too small, use two.
- Cut the pork belly into 2 cm strips and scatter them among the vegetables. Pat the chicken thighs dry on both sides and lay them on top, skin up. Don't salt yet.Dry skin goes crisp, damp skin goes rubbery — ten seconds with kitchen paper decides it. The belly strips sit underneath rather than on top: down there they brown in their own fat instead of drying out.
- Tray into the oven for 40 minutes. Don't open it, don't stir, don't check.
- Take the tray out. Dot the butter over the cauliflower, scatter the salt, squeeze the lemon over and add the olive oil. Five more minutes in the oven, until the butter has melted.
- Let the tray sit 5 minutes before you box it up. Hot food straight into the fridge makes condensation, and the next day you find the lot swimming.
This one is the backbone of the week: the cheapest meat in the shop and the oven doing all the work.
Two meats, two jobs. The thighs bring the roast flavour and the protein; the pork belly strips bring the calories, at half the protein per gram. Together that’s over half a kilo of meat for two portions — 260 g each — without pushing the day’s protein up.
Why bone-in, skin-on thighs rather than chicken breast. Breast costs three times as much per kilo of protein, dries out if you forget it for two minutes and has no fat. Thighs forgive you, and as they render they season the cauliflower underneath. The bone keeps the meat juicy.
Frozen cauliflower, not fresh. Half the price, already cut, and it doesn’t rot in the fridge. Its only problem is water, and water is solved with plenty of fat and a hot oven — which is why the lard goes in from the start and the oven is at 220°C, not 180.
Why smoked paprika. It gives the impression of smoke and salt without adding any salt. It’s the most efficient thing on the spice shelf for low-sodium cooking.
Butter at the end, not the start. Put it in at the beginning and it burns over 40 minutes at 220°C. Added at the end it stays butter — you taste it. There’s far less of it than in the old version of this recipe, because those calories now come from pork belly, which is a great deal more satisfying on the plate than a melted knob of butter.
Photo: Liat Portal for Foodie Disorder - Grilled Chicken with Roasted Vegetables by HaJunkiyada, licence BY-SA 4.0.