Baked chicken and potatoes with yogurt and lemon
A one-dish supper of chicken quarters and sliced potatoes baked under a blanket of yogurt and lemon juice. The yogurt keeps the meat tender and turns the pan juices creamy and tangy; the potatoes underneath soak up everything that drips down. Almost no work, and very little to wash up.
Ingredients
Instructions
Heat the oven to 400°F.
Prepare the chicken. If starting with a whole bird, cut it into four pieces — two leg quarters and two breast pieces — and remove the backbone. Pat everything dry and season well on both sides with salt and pepper.
Layer the dish. Butter a baking dish generously. Spread the potato slices across the bottom in an even layer, overlapping slightly, and season them. Lay the chicken pieces on top, skin side up.
Add the yogurt and lemon. Whisk the yogurt with the lemon juice and 1 tsp salt until smooth, then pour it evenly over the chicken and potatoes. Dot the top with the softened butter.
Cover and bake. Cover the dish tightly with buttered foil, buttered side down, and bake for 40 minutes.
Add the water. Take the dish out, lift the foil, and pour the boiling water down the side of the dish rather than over the chicken. Re-cover and return to the oven for another 15 minutes.
Uncover and brown. Remove the foil and bake for a final 15-20 minutes, until the chicken skin is golden and the potatoes are completely tender. The chicken is done when a thermometer in the thickest part of the thigh reads 165°F.
Rest and serve. Let it stand for 10 minutes. Spoon the pan juices back over the chicken, scatter with parsley, and serve straight from the dish with the lemon slices alongside.
Notes
Use full-fat yogurt, and nothing else. Low-fat and nonfat yogurt will split into grainy curds in a hot oven. Whole-milk plain yogurt holds together far better, and Greek-style holds together best of all. If you use Greek, thin it with a couple of tablespoons of water before pouring. Some separation is normal, even good yogurt will look slightly broken around the edges. Stir the juices together before spooning them over and nobody will notice.
Slice the potatoes thin and evenly. A quarter inch is the target. Thicker slices won't be cooked through when the chicken is ready, and this is the one thing that most often goes wrong here. A mandoline makes it trivial.
Don't skip the boiling water. It keeps the potatoes from drying out during the long covered bake, and it's what turns the yogurt and lemon into a sauce rather than a paste. Boiling, not cold — cold water will drop the oven temperature and stall the cooking.
Serve from the dish. Some versions of this recipe direct you to turn the whole thing out onto a platter. Don't; it will collapse. It looks better in the dish it was baked in anyway.
Two lemons is properly tart. That's the character of the dish, but if you'd rather it were gentler, start with one lemon and add more at the table. You can always decorate the dish with slices of lemon, or add them on top when removing the foil so they bake and get golden.
Variations
Spiced. Whisk 1 tsp ground cumin, 1 tsp sweet paprika and 1/2 tsp turmeric into the yogurt. This is the version most people will prefer, and it costs nothing.
With garlic. Four cloves, crushed into the yogurt, or a whole head halved crosswise and tucked among the potatoes.
With onions. A large onion, sliced thin and scattered over the potatoes before the chicken goes on. It collapses into the sauce and sweetens it.
Thighs only. Six bone-in, skin-on thighs instead of a whole bird. More forgiving, since there's no breast meat to dry out, and about 10 minutes faster.
Sweet potatoes. Or half regular, half sweet. They cook slightly faster, so slice them a touch thicker.
With herbs. A few sprigs of thyme or oregano among the potatoes, and mint instead of parsley at the end.
Source
Cooking chicken under yogurt is an old idea across North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean and South Asia, and the reasoning is practical rather than decorative. The acid in yogurt works on the surface of the meat and helps keep it tender, while the fat and milk solids protect it from the direct heat of the oven. Lemon does similar work from a different angle. Together they produce a sauce out of what would otherwise just be pan drippings.
The technique turns up in many forms — as a marinade for grilled meat, as a braising medium, and, as here, simply poured over and baked. What's distinctive about this version is how little it asks of the cook: no browning, no marinating, no separate sauce. Everything goes into one dish and the oven does the rest, which is the mark of a home recipe rather than a restaurant one.
The potatoes are doing more than bulking it out. Laid underneath, they catch the yogurt, the lemon and the fat rendering from the chicken skin, and they end up as the better half of the dish. It's worth putting them in an even layer for that reason alone.