Roasted Chicken with Oil-Cured Moroccan Olives and Pancetta

I absolutely love olives, straight out of my hand, eating them like popcorn. But I have to admit, I’m usually not so crazy about them incorporated into dishes. Nonetheless, we get so many requests from our customers for olive recipes (after all, we are an olive company) that they have become a large part of our recipe collection. After my latest kitchen adventure with olives—featuring oil-cured olives—I have to say, my previous opinion about olive dishes has gone out the window. For me, this was the most successful olive recipe ever, and maybe the best roasted chicken recipe ever. The chicken was amazingly tender, and actually the juices created in the bottom of the pan were even better than the chicken itself, if that’s possible. I think I was happiest leaning over the pan, sopping up the juices with my piece of crusty bread, the juices dribbling down my chin.

Oil-cured olives are those deep black olives you see in your grocer’s olive bar that look like they have the skin of a well-worn, aged face after years of sun worshiping. True olive connoisseurs particularly appreciate the oil-cured olive. Its taste is so complex, so intense. The variety of olive used is Beldi; they are most commonly called oil cured, but actually they are only packed in oil after they have been cured. They are a Moroccan olive that is picked very ripe and black, then actually packed in layers of salt and left to cure. Once they become soft and wrinkled, they are washed and packed in oil.

In this recipe, the tangy olives are the perfect complement for the natural sweetness of the chicken and pancetta. You can use chicken breasts if that’s what you have on hand, but I highly recommend thigh and leg meat for this recipe; their flavor and moisture really make a noticeable difference here.

RECIPE (click here to see the full recipe)