WHAT’S COOKING: Roast bone-in chicken breasts with a chimichurri dry rub

Turn the tables on chimichurri. Instead of the usual wet sauce or condiment we love, make a dry rub from similar, but dried, ingredients. It’s quite a different thing, but the herby flavour hit is great.

I wanted to roast whole chicken breasts in the larger air fryer oven. Not breast fillets – bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts that could be roasted just as you would the whole bird.

I thought of chimichurri. But chimichurri is wet, and I wanted the skin to be golden and crisp. So I rethought chimichurri instead.

I first made chimichurri in June 2019. I know this because I’ve just googled my recipe, and it was published as one of the first “Lockdown Recipes of the Day”, which is how these regular TGIFood recipes started. My whole food writing life changed right then, during lockdown, and all that has followed.

I decided to publish a recipe every day while we were bunkered in our houses and trying to think of things to make with what we had in the crisper and cupboards.

Chimichurri comes from Argentina and Uruguay and it’s fresh. You don’t blend it – you chop and stir. Its chief ingredient is parsley, followed by oregano (dried, actually, because of that woody flavour it attains once dried), garlic and chilli, often red pepper flakes but sometimes fresh chilli. There’s also red wine vinegar, olive oil, pepper and coarse salt.

For this recipe I tried to keep the relative quantities more or less proportionate to traditional chimichurri. Lots of dried parsley, not quite as much dried oregano – 3 to 2. I used garlic powder, and instead of red pepper flakes I added some pimenton, the smoked paprika that I’ve grown to love lately.

I left out the red wine vinegar, but I used olive oil to coat the breasts before they went into a very hot oven.

However, when it came to deglazing the pan before serving, I added a splash of red wine vinegar along with chicken stock.

Preheat a large air fryer oven to 200°C or a big conventional oven to 220°C.

Make the rub: mix all the dry ingredients together in a small bowl. Tip it onto a board or plate and spread it out.

Drizzle olive oil over the breasts. Season them generously with coarse salt.

Roast in a pre-heated 200°C countertop air fryer oven for 30 minutes, or in a large conventional oven for 35 to 40 minutes at 220°C.

I switched the oven to grill for the last few minutes to ensure a crisp, golden skin, but watch it so it doesn’t blacken.