Piri Piri Roast Chicken Legs Recipe
By Nicola Lando
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80 minutes prep time
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60 minutes cook time
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Intermediate
African birds’ eye chillies are also known as piri piri chillies. ‘Piri piri’ is the Swahili word for ‘chilli chilli’, so they’re ‘chilli chilli chillies’! With a name like that, it’s unsurprising that these tiny peppers are far hotter than their size would seem to allow. Birds’ eye chillies are ideal for infusing oil or vinegar to make fiery dressings. Or grind the dried chillies with coarse sea or rock salt to make a hot seasoning.
Piri piri marinades usually include fresh mild red chillies for colour, as well as the tiny piri piri chilli. We’ve opted for simplicity in this recipe, using dried piri piri alone, to make it a larder-friendly dish and an easy recipe for a crowd.
This recipe looks beautiful presented on Bordallo Pinheiro's Fantasia platter!
This is an extract from The Big Chilli Advent Calendar 2017.
Ingredients Serves: 4
- 100ml olive oil
- 100ml of lemon juice (from two large lemons)
- 20 or 2.3g bird's eye chilli peppers
- 1 tsp dried oregano
- 4 large cloves minced garlic
- 2 tsp fine salt
- 4 chicken legs
Method
- Combine the olive oil, lemon juice, bird's eye chilli peppers and dried oregano in a small pan. Bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes.
- Remove from heat and pour into a blender. Add the minced garlic and fine salt. Blend until smooth and leave to cool completely.
- Next prepare chicken legs. To help the marinade penetrate the chicken, cut two long slashes into each chicken leg: one across the thigh and one across the drumstick.
- Place the chicken in a plastic bag and pour the marinade. Rub in well, seal and place in fridge for at least 1 hour to marinate.
- Lay the chicken pieces on a baking tray and pour over any remaining marinade.
- Roast in a preheated oven at 180°C for 30 minutes until cooked through, and then crisp up under a hot grill for a further 5 minutes.
- Serve with a crisp green salad and jacket potato, chips or potato salad.
About the author
Nicola is co-founder and CEO at Sous Chef. She has worked in food for over ten years.
Nicola first explored cooking as a career when training at Leiths, before spending the next decade in Finance. However... after a stage as a chef at a London Michelin-starred restaurant, Nicola saw the incredible ingredients available only to chefs. And wanted access to them herself. So Sous Chef was born.
Today, Nicola is ingredients buyer and a recipe writer at Sous Chef. She frequently travels internationally to food fairs, and to meet producers. Her cookbook library is vast, and her knowledge of the storecupboard is unrivalled. She tastes thousands of ingredients every year, to select only the best to stock at Sous Chef.
Nicola shares her knowledge of ingredients and writes recipes to showcase those products. Learning from Sous Chef's suppliers and her travels, Nicola writes many of the recipes on the Sous Chef website. Nicola's recipes are big on flavour, where the ingredients truly shine (although that's from someone who cooks for hours each day - so they're rarely tray-bakes!).
