Hunter's Chicken · Benedetta Rossi

Pour a thread of olive oil into a wide, heavy pan with a lid — wide enough that all the chicken will lie in one layer.

💡 Pan size decides this dish. Crowd the chicken into a small pan and the pieces steam in their own juices instead of browning, and you lose the layer of flavour everything else is built on.

Chop the onion, carrot and celery rib coarsely — straight into the pan, as Benedetta does.

💡 COARSE, not fine. These pieces sit under the chicken for 40 minutes and slowly melt into the sauce; chopped small they would burn during the browning stage.

Turn the heat to medium and let the vegetables sizzle for a few minutes, then add the 2 rosemary sprigs and the whole garlic clove.

💡 Garlic whole, never chopped. A chopped clove would scorch and go bitter in the time this pan needs; a whole one gives up its perfume slowly and can be lifted out later.

Cook until the vegetables have softened and lost their sharp edges — about 5 minutes — stirring so nothing colours too fast.

Lay the chicken pieces into the pan skin-side DOWN, in a single layer. Leave them completely alone and let them brown.

💡 Skin down first, and then do not touch it. The skin needs several uninterrupted minutes against the hot pan to render its fat and go golden — every time you lift a piece to check, you reset that clock.

After 5–6 minutes, when the skin lifts away from the pan without sticking, start turning the pieces to colour them on every side — another 5 minutes or so.

💡 If a piece grips the pan, it is telling you it is not ready. Browned skin releases itself. Force it and you leave the crust behind.

Season the chicken with fine salt and black pepper, stir everything around once, then pour in the 100 ml of red wine.

💡 Season now, not at the start. Salt on raw chicken draws moisture to the surface and moisture is the enemy of browning.

Let the wine bubble hard for 2–3 minutes, scraping the brown crust off the base with a wooden spoon, until the sharp alcohol smell has gone.

💡 Those stuck-on brown bits are the best flavour in the pan, and wine dissolves them in seconds. Skip the scraping and you leave it on the metal. Also: do not cover the pan yet — the alcohol has to escape.

Add the 400 g of peeled tomatoes, crushing each one against the side of the pan with your spoon, then pour in a little water — enough to come about half way up the chicken.

💡 Half way up, not covered. This is a braise, not a stew — the exposed top of each piece keeps the skin from going flabby while the underside simmers.

Put the lid on, turn the heat down to low and leave it to cook for about 40 minutes, stirring every ten minutes or so.

💡 Low means barely a bubble. A hard boil under a lid tightens chicken fibres and squeezes the juice out — the meat should come off the bone because it relaxed, not because it was blasted.

With about 5 minutes to go, taste the sauce and correct the salt, then scatter in the 100 g of black olives and stir them through.

💡 Olives last, and taste BEFORE they go in — they are salty and will season the sauce on their own. Add them at the start and they turn grey, mushy and overwhelmingly salty.

Check the chicken is done: pierce the thickest part of a thigh and the juices should run clear, and the meat should be pulling back from the bone.

Turn off the heat and let the pan sit, lidded, for 5 minutes before serving — straight from the pan, with bread for the sauce.

💡 Those 5 minutes let the juices settle back into the meat instead of running onto the plate. The sauce also thickens slightly as it stops moving.