Baked Chicken with Coconut Milk and Curry

The oven stage is where people get it wrong by assuming "bake" means "simmer under a lid." It isn't covered. A fan oven at 190°C — hot enough that the surface of the sauce actively reduces, not just warms through — is thickening the coconut-cream-stock mixture by evaporation while the broccoli steams in its own moisture and the chicken finishes gently, no longer searing, just arriving at done. If your dish is covered with foil, you get a thin, wet sauce and crunchy broccoli with no colour; if it's open and your oven runs cool, you get a watery sauce and overdone chicken, because the two things aren't converging at the same rate. Doneness here isn't a clock number — it's the sauce visibly tightening around the broccoli and the broccoli going from squeaky-raw to tender-with-a-bit-of-bite. The 20–25 minutes is a lower bound; a domestic oven that doesn't hold its stated temperature evenly (most don't, especially near the door) will drift either side of it.

The rice cooking "meanwhile" is not a throwaway line — it's the one bit of real time management in the whole thing. Basmati wants a rinse before it goes in the water, not for ritual but because the starch coating it is what makes rice gluey; rinse it off and the grains stay separate. Some say you must soak it for thirty minutes first — you don't, not for a weeknight dish like this, a good rinse and attentive timing does the same job with less planning.

On the chicken: breast, not thigh, which is the actual compromise of this dish — breast dries out faster than thigh, so the sear-then-bake method exists specifically to protect a cut that punishes overcooking. If you've got thigh fillets lying around, use them instead and worry less about timing; they forgive you.

Coconut milk — buy it in the tin, not the drinks-aisle "coconut milk" meant for smoothies, which is thinned to nothing. You want the kind that separates into a thick cap and thin liquid when it sits; shake the tin or stir once it's open. If you only have coconut cream, loosen it with a splash of the stock. Double cream on top of that isn't tradition, it's just British kitchens reaching for the dairy they always have, to round out acidity from the pineapple and give the sauce a cling that stock and coconut milk alone don't give you.

Curry powder is the one ingredient where "any curry powder" is honestly fine — this isn't a dish built around a single spice blend's identity, it's built around the idea of curry powder, warm and a bit sweet and a bit hot depending what's in your jar. Coriander and cumin on top of that aren't correcting a bad curry powder, they're pushing the warm, earthy register further because tinned blends go stale in cupboards and lose their top notes first.

The pineapple, syrup included, is doing acid-and-sugar work that in a more traditional curry would come from tamarind or tomato — it's the sharp counter to all that cream and coconut fat. Any oil with no smell of its own works for the initial fry: sunflower, vegetable, a neutral rapeseed — not your good olive oil, which has a flavour worth protecting for something that'll actually taste it. The peanuts and parsley at the end aren't garnish for the photo — salted peanuts give you the crunch that a soft, creamy dish is otherwise missing entirely, and parsley is doing nothing more mystical than cutting through the richness with something green and a bit bitter. Patience is the real ingredient missing from most home versions — rushing the onion and leek stage, skipping the spice-toasting minute, covering the dish in the oven out of habit from other recipes — each shortcut shows up later as a flat, wet, under-seasoned sauce, and none of it is fixable once it's in front of you.