Recipe | Roast chicken with Pedro Ximenez

I love Pedro Ximenez (or PX). I love drinking it, I even love saying it (you’ve got to really lean into the ‘x’, like ‘Hxxxxxxxximeneth’). But I hadn’t, until Monday night, cooked with it. I have a feeling I’ve come across a PX ice cream at some point which certainly makes sense, the treacly sherry being just the thing for whipping into a vanilla custard, but never, to my knowledge, in savoury cooking.

A half-drunk bottle of the stuff had sat by my cooker for months, gathering dust and spattered oil. In a moment of fridge sluttery I tipped it all over a waiting chicken, forming a shallow bath in the bottom of the roasting dish. It was joined by great wedges of red onion, lemon, and garlic – lots of garlic. I then practically assaulted the bird with salt and pepper, added a glug of olive oil, enough thyme to choke a mule, and bunged it in the oven at 220C. After 15 minutes the oven went down to 190C for another 45 minutes.

As the bird rested I mashed all the garlic and onion into the now-pretty-much-ready-to-go gravy, and added a little water just to thin it out a bit. Our bird was carved and served with the sweetest, garlic-est gravy I’ve ever had.

8 thoughts on “Recipe | Roast chicken with Pedro Ximenez

  1. I also love saying Pedro Hxxximenezz. But I especially love hearing it a la Nigella on her series. Such fun word. I also like saying ‘couscous’ and ‘beurre blanc’ for some reason.
    You assaulted the bird.. That makes me laugh. The bird does look tasty. Yum.

  2. Oh, hello. This looks brilliant. Am equally obsessed with Pedro (as it’s colloquially known in our flat- usually in the context of ‘oh dear,it’s been one of those days- do I need to call in Pedro?’). A splash of it with a couple of squares of very dark chocolate can make the prickliest of days tolerable. A while ago I busted out a Pedro sabayon with blackberries. Was pretty cheerful. But this, this is something else.

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