Jamie Oliver Chicken In Baked Bread Sauce

Jamie Oliver’s chicken in baked bread sauce nestles skin-on chicken thighs and bacon into a tray of torn bread soaked in milk, eggs, mustard, nutmeg and cloves, then bakes the whole thing at 180°C for 50 minutes until golden. The bread absorbs the chicken juices and sets into a savoury, custardy, spiced base. It serves four at 691 kcal with seasonal greens.

The recipe is from Simply Jamie (2024) and featured on both Channel 4’s Jamie: Fast and Simple and ITV’s This Morning. Oliver’s pitch is blunt: “What’s better than bread sauce? Chicken and bacon baked in bread sauce, that’s what.” He’s reversed the traditional British relationship where bread sauce is a side for roast chicken, making the sauce the cooking medium and the chicken the thing nestled into it.

The bread does two jobs. The soft middles tear into the milk mixture and soak up the liquid, setting into a spiced, eggy, almost-savoury-bread-pudding base as the tray bakes. The crusts, dunked in the mixture and arranged around the edge, crisp up in the oven’s heat into crunchy, golden soldiers that contrast with the soft, soaked centre.

Jamie Oliver Chicken In Baked Bread Sauce

Recipe by Pinch Perfect

0.0 from 0 votes

Course: Dinner, LunchCuisine: BritishDifficulty: Easy

Servings

4

servings

Prep time

10

minutes

Cooking time

50

minutes

Calories

691

kcal

Total time

1

hour 

Jamie Oliver’s reversed bread sauce from Simply Jamie: chicken thighs and bacon baked into a tray of milk-soaked, spiced, eggy bread that sets into a savoury pudding as it cooks. Roast dinner vibes, one tray. Serves four.

Ingredients

• 1 onion

• 600ml whole milk

• 2 teaspoons English mustard

• 4 small bay leaves

• 2 large free-range eggs

• ½ a nutmeg

• 2 cloves

• 300g white bread

• 4 large free-range chicken thighs, skin on, bone in

• olive oil

• 2 rashers of higher-welfare smoked streaky bacon

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Directions

• Build the base:Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/gas 4. Peel, halve and finely slice the onion. Place in a 25cm x 30cm roasting tray with the milk, mustard, bay leaves and eggs. Finely grate in the nutmeg and cloves, add a pinch of salt and pepper.
• Add the bread:Slice the crusts off the bread and reserve. Tear the soft middles into the tray, then really scrunch and mix everything together. Dunk the reserved crusts in the mixture and arrange them around the edge of the tray.
• Add the chicken:Rub the chicken thighs with a little salt, pepper and olive oil, then nestle them into the tray, skin side up. Halve the bacon rashers and add.
• Bake:Roast for 50 minutes, or until golden. Serve with seasonal greens.

Notes

• Note: For a vegetarian version, replace the chicken and bacon with 1 small cauliflower (400g) broken into chunky florets, tossed in olive oil, salt and pepper, and grate in 80g of Cheddar. Cover with foil and roast as above, removing the foil halfway.

FAQs

What is bread sauce, and why bake chicken in it?

Bread sauce is a traditional British condiment served alongside roast chicken or turkey, made by simmering milk with onion, bay, cloves and nutmeg, then stirring in breadcrumbs until it thickens into a smooth, spiced, porridge-like sauce. It’s a fixture on Christmas dinner tables across Britain.

Oliver’s twist is making the bread sauce the cooking vessel rather than the accompaniment. The chicken sits in the sauce as it bakes, so the bread absorbs the chicken juices and the rendered bacon fat, turning from raw, milky bread into something rich, savoury and almost custard-like. It’s the same flavours, rearranged.

Why add eggs to the bread mixture?

The eggs bind and set the bread-and-milk mixture as it bakes, turning it from a sloppy porridge into a firmer, custardy base that holds its shape when you serve it. Without eggs, the soaked bread would stay loose and wet under the chicken, more like a stuffing soup than a baked pudding.

Two eggs in 600ml of milk and 300g of bread is a similar ratio to a bread-and-butter pudding, which is essentially what the base becomes: a savoury bread pudding baked under roast chicken. The mustard, nutmeg and cloves give it the bread-sauce flavour rather than a sweet one.

Why put the crusts around the edge?

They crisp up. The soft middles of the bread tear and soak into the milk, becoming the soft, set base. But the crusts, dunked first and arranged around the edge where the oven’s heat hits directly, dry out and turn golden and crunchy during the 50-minute bake. You get two textures from one loaf: soft centre, crispy edges.

It’s a clever structural touch: the crusts form a kind of wall around the tray that holds the liquid mixture in during the first part of baking, before the eggs set and everything firms up.

Is this a Christmas dish?

Oliver features it on ITV’s This Morning as his “festive traybake,” and the bread-sauce spicing (nutmeg, cloves, bay, mustard) is pure Christmas dinner. But he also positions it as a year-round Simply Jamie supper, which is the whole point of the book: taking familiar flavours and making them weeknight-easy.

For Christmas, it could replace both the roast chicken and the bread sauce in one tray, cutting the washing up dramatically. For a Tuesday night, it’s a comforting, one-tray bake that tastes like a roast dinner without the hours of effort.

What bread should I use?

White bread, not wholemeal or seeded, since it needs to absorb the milk and eggs cleanly and set smooth. A standard sliced white loaf, a white bloomer or any soft white bread works. Day-old is ideal because it’s drier and soaks up the liquid faster without going mushy.

Avoid anything too crusty or artisanal for the torn middles, since heavy bread won’t soak properly in the time allowed. The crusts, however, benefit from being sturdy: they need to hold their shape at the edges and crisp rather than collapse.

What should I serve alongside?

Oliver says seasonal greens, and he’s right: steamed broccoli, cabbage, kale or green beans are all you need. The tray is already carbs (bread), protein (chicken), fat (bacon, milk, eggs) and plenty of flavour, so something green and simple is the only gap.

For a full Simply Jamie spread, this bake as the main with a sweet pea chicken-style green side, followed by the pear and blackberry crumble from Easy Air Fryer, makes a proper three-course comfort supper. His chicken and mushroom bake from the same book takes a similar one-tray approach but with a completely different flavour (condensed soup, rice, butter beans).