Peri Peri Chicken

📖Choose your adventure

We use cayenne chillies for a perfect blend of flavour, colour, and heat. To control the spice level, we remove the seeds. For spice enthusiasts, include some or all the chilli seeds for an extra kick. If you're feeling daring and want an extra extra kick, embrace tradition and use bird’s eye chillies. 🌶️

🪜Simple steps to make peri peri chicken

Create the marinade

Blend together chillies, lemon zest and juice, paprika, oregano, salt and olive oil.

Marinate the chicken

Pour the marinade over chicken pieces and let it work its magic, allowing the flavours to mingle for up to 4 hours.

Roast to perfection

Cook the marinated chicken until it's perfectly juicy and tender. Watch as the edges become a touch blackened, adding a hint of smokiness to the dish.

🥘 Ingredients

Chicken Thighs – bone-in/skin-on. Thighs have a slightly higher fat content compared to chicken breasts or legs. This extra fat contributes to a richer flavour and can help keep the meat moist and juicy during cooking. Chicken thighs are less prone to drying out and are hard to get wrong. They can be more affordable than other cuts. Bone-in adds flavour. The skin protects the chicken flesh to keep it moist and tender. It also gifts you with a flavoured schmaltz (chicken fat) to enhance the peri peri sauce. Pure culinary gold, especially when paired with steamed rice.

Cayenne Chillies – add colour, flavour and heat. These larger chillies are not as hot as their smaller counterparts, the bird’s eye chillies. You can remove some or all the seeds to create mild heat, but keep all the flavour. Most of the spiciness of chillies is in the seeds.

Lemons – we use the zest and juice from two lemons. Make sure you buy organic or wax-free (or wash the outside well to get rid of the wax often applied to make them shiny).

Sweet Smoked Paprika – this spice adds wonderful colour, mild heat and smoky flavour.

Fresh Oregano Leaves – Fresh oregano has a pungent, peppery, and slightly minty flavour. It tastes quite different from dried oregano; try to source it if you can.

Olive Oil – helps bring the marinade ingredients together and adds flavour.

🔪 Instructions

Create the Marinade

It’s a very simple recipe, this one! Use a mini food processor or stick blender to blend the marinade ingredients. Zest the lemons before you juice them 😊. Deseed some or all the chillies if you want less heat. to do this, cut them in half down their length and use a teaspoon to scoop out and discard the seeds. The skins alone provide quite mild heat (which is what I go with when I’m feeding this to my kids). I plan to sneak in some more seeds each time. Roughly chop the chillies before blending. I ended up with quite a chunky marinade for these photos. If you want a smoother sauce, blend for longer. Or get a better food processor. Mine isn't great.

Marinate the chicken

Pour the marinade over the chicken and gently move the pieces around to cover all surfaces. Try to keep the skin of the chicken pieces in place. Marinade for up to 4 hours. Even half an hour will do well to help infuse the chicken with the marinade flavours. We don’t recommend long marinading time (longer than 8 hours) for marinades like this with citrus in them. It ends up changing the texture of the meat and making it mushy.

When it's time to cook, remove the chicken pieces from the marinade. Scrape off any extra marinade from the skin using your fingers. The size of the baking dish is important. You want something that fits the chicken in one layer quite snugly. It needs to have high enough sides to shield the sides of the chicken. This way the chicken will be better protected from direct heat and will remain tender. Also, the sauce won’t disappear to evaporation.

Dab the surface with more paper towel to dry the skins slightly. This encourages better browning. The skins won’t end up crispy because they won’t be dry enough for this. Pour the marinade around the outside of the chicken pieces so that they are sitting in it.

Roast to perfection

Bake uncovered for around 35 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through. To check doneness, make a slit with a sharp knife through the thickest part of the largest chicken thigh. Press down nearby with the blade, and ensure that the juices running out are clear, not pink. When cooked, lift the chicken pieces out and transfer to a wooden board or serving platter to rest for 5 minutes.

Pour the marinade into a serving jug. If you want, you can remove and discard some of the excess oil that will rise to the surface with a spoon.