Pollo Horneado

Ingredients

• 1 whole chicken, about 1.8 kg
• 2 bitter oranges (naranja agria), juiced
• 2 limes, juiced
• 2 tbsp white vinegar
• 8 garlic cloves, mashed to a paste with salt
• 1 tbsp dried oregano
• 2 onions, 1 grated and 1 cut into thick rings
• 1 red pepper, cut into strips
• 4 culantro leaves, chopped
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp salt
• 1 tsp black pepper, coarsely ground
• 600 g potatoes, halved — optional

Method

1. Wash the bird in citrus

   Joint the chicken into eight pieces or leave it whole, then rub it all over with the bitter orange juice, lime juice and vinegar and let it sit for ten minutes before patting it dry. This is the agrio step every Dominican kitchen does first: the acid strips the slick, faintly metallic film from the skin, and a bird that goes into the adobo wet with it tastes of exactly that under all the oregano.

2. Make the adobo and marinate

   Mash the garlic with the salt into a paste, then stir in the oregano, pepper, grated onion, culantro, olive oil and whatever citrus juice is left. Work it under the skin as well as over it and refrigerate for at least an hour — overnight is better. Adobo sitting only on the surface burns off in the oven and leaves the meat itself unseasoned.

   1 h

3. Heat the oven properly

   Heat the oven to 200°C and take the chicken out of the fridge twenty minutes before it goes in. A fridge-cold bird in a lukewarm oven steams in its own marinade for the first half hour and the skin never recovers — it turns pale and slack instead of lacquered.

4. Arrange the tray

   Scatter the onion rings, pepper strips and potatoes across a roasting tin, sit the chicken on top and pour over every drop of adobo left in the bowl. Raising the bird on the vegetables lets air under it so the underside browns instead of sitting in liquid.

5. Roast and baste

   Roast for about an hour and ten minutes, spooning the tray juices over the chicken every twenty minutes. If the juices dry out before the bird is done, add a small cup of water to the tin rather than letting the tray catch — burnt adobo turns the whole pan sauce bitter.

   1 h 10 min

6. Check it is cooked, then rest it

   The thickest part of the thigh should read 75°C and the juices should run clear with no pink at the bone. Rest it fifteen minutes before carving; cut straight away and the juice you spent two hours seasoning runs out onto the board.

   15 min

7. Serve with the pan sauce

   Tip the tray juices, softened onion and pepper into a jug, skim the fat and spoon it over the carved chicken. Serve with white rice and habichuelas guisadas, which is where that sauce is really going.