Stone Fruit Salad with Chicken and Burrata

Chicken breast is lean, which means it has almost no fat to protect it from the heat — that's why the butter sits on top rather than being mixed in, and why 200°C fan with a lid-free dish is really about surface browning while the inside just reaches safe doneness, not about building deep flavour through long cooking. The zest and thyme go on the outside because they're aromatic oils that need contact with fat and heat to release, not buried inside the meat where they'd do nothing. Doneness here isn't a clock number: press the thickest part, it should spring back rather than feel soft and wet, or the juices should run clear, not pink, when you cut in. Pull it a touch early rather than late — chicken breast carries on cooking from its own heat for a minute or two after it leaves the oven, and that's the difference between juicy and chalky.

The bread cubes are there to do a job rocket and fruit can't: give you something that resists the bite. Olive oil coats each cube so the heat crisps the surface instead of just baking it dry all the way through — a dry crouton with no oil is sawdust by the time it's crisp. Watch colour, not time: pale gold with the edges just starting to go deeper means stop, because the last stretch from gold to brown happens fast and turns bitter if you look away. Any firm, slightly stale bread works — a baguette end, a Sunday-loaf heel going hard at the back of the bread bin is actually better than fresh, because fresh bread has too much moisture to crisp properly in 10 minutes.

The dressing leans on elderflower syrup rather than honey or sugar, which tells you something about the fruit it's meant to sit next to — elderflower has a light floral note that doesn't fight peach and apricot the way honey's heavier sweetness can. If you don't have it, a light syrup — even sugar dissolved in a splash of water with a squeeze of that leftover lemon — does the sweetening job, though you lose the perfume. Dijon mustard isn't for heat here; it's an emulsifier, holding the oil and vinegar together so the dressing coats rather than separates into oily pools on the plate. Apple cider vinegar gives the acid that makes burrata and sweet fruit make sense together — without it the whole plate reads as one-note sweet.

Stone fruit is the one ingredient you can't fix with technique. Peaches and apricots need to give slightly under thumb pressure at the shoulder, not the stem end — rock-hard ones that "ripen on the counter" rarely do, they just go from hard to soft without ever getting sweet. If yours aren't there yet, a few minutes under a hot broiler or a dry pan actually helps underripe stone fruit along, caramelising what sugar there is.

Burrata is the expensive decision in this list, and the reason it goes on last, whole or barely torn, straight from the fridge, is simple: it's a bag of cream inside a mozzarella skin, and if it sits out warming up while you plate everything else, it collapses into a puddle before anyone's eaten a bite. If burrata isn't to be had or the budget doesn't stretch — it's a London price for what is, at heart, a very fresh cheese — a good buffalo mozzarella torn by hand gets you most of the way, just without the cream centre. Pine nuts toasted dry in a pan, moved constantly, go from pale to burnt in the time it takes to answer the phone — that's the one moment in this recipe where turning your back actually costs you the dish.