Dates.
The health-nut's favourite dried fruit. Plus the recipe for my Chicken with Dates & Olives.
Welcome to ingredient, where every so often I take a deep dive into some of my favourite seasonal and store cupboard ingredients. Today I’m focusing on dates, the jammy dried fruit that is so beloved by health food-nuts for their natural sweetness, and Middle Eastern cuisines for their jammy depth.
At the bottom of this post you’ll find my recipe for my deliciously sweet and sour, all in one recipe for Chicken with Dates & Olives. All you need to add to make it a meal is a nice bit of crusty bread to mop up all those delicious pan juices.
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Dates serve two purposes in my kitchen. Purchased either in trays with their pit still in the middle, or pitted in bags they can be either sweet or savoury; it usually depends on if I’m cooking for myself, or for my clients which they end up being.
Dates for my clients are a sweet, sticky sugar alternative, something healthy eating bloggers and Instagrammers have been buying into for years as a simple alternative to soak and blitz to avoid refined sugars, something Ella Mills was doing at a time when no one had heard of spirulina, and chia seeds were a strange, unusual ingredient many, many column lengths were given over to explaining. They do work rather well in this context, and most recently for a client I’ve been stuffing them with coconut, dipping them in chocolate and flash-freezing them for an on-trend approximation of a no-refined sugar Bounty bar (the result is in fact delicious, and I’ll be sharing the recipe in Nibbles once it is online!)
If I’m cooking with dates for me, however, the result is pretty much always savoury; if I have them to hand I always chop dates along with pistachios and whatever herbs I have in the vegetable drawer to fold through hot couscous, and I love them baked alongside chicken and a little bit of sauce where they become sticky and sweet, the perfect foil to sour and savoury flavours elsewhere. A bottle of Odysea Date Molasses is also one of my kitchen MVPs, richer, sweeter and more sultry than the more (now) ubiquitous pomegranate molasses, it’s my first choice paired with red wine vinegar and extra virgin olive oil to dress cooked beetroot, and J’s parents now have a bottle in their kitchen just to make this dish of Sweet Potato Wedges with Almond Tahini, where a final drizzle of date molasses is the finishing touch that brings all the flavours of the dish together,
Dates are the fruit of the date palm, a tree found across the Middle East, Africa, Australia and California. Starting off dark brown and yellow, they’re dried to a deep brown before they hit the markets, where when purchased they can be stuffed, turned into syrups, drinks (an alternative to alcohol in cultures where it is avoided) and otherwise greatly enjoyed.
It is common to break the Ramadan fast with a date, and dates are intrinsically linked to the Jewish New Year festival of Rosh Hashanah where they symbolise blessings for the year to come. Here in Britain, where would our traditional pub desserts be without the dates that are blitzed to make the base of a Sticky Toffee Pudding? And, unfortunately, because I can’t stand the stuff what would J’s bacon sandwich without date-based HP sauce? (Well, tastier made with ketchup instead, but apparently that’s “just your oppinion”!)
This simple, all-in-one preparation of chicken, dates and olives started life - sort of - as Silver Palate’s cult Chicken Marbella recipe. There are some similar hallmarks: chicken pieces, olives, dried fruit (in the original recipe’s case, prunes), red wine vinegar, white wine and a sweetener (again, originally brown sugar) except by the time I’d got my hands on the recipe it was
’s version, where he’d used his heritage to inform switching the prunes and sugar for dates and their molasses. And then I was reading it in American on The Kitchn, rather than the version using British measures on his website, so it went through a few rounds of adapting to make fit with our metrics, what I had to hand, and our tastes (there were some versions with shallots and onions in, but ultimately I decided they were a bad idea).
Chicken with Dates and Olives
Serves: 2-3, Preparation time: 10 minutes, Cooking time: 40 minutes
The size of dish you use here is important for a sweet-and-sour, rich and tangy sauce; cram the chicken in too tightly and it won’t reduce any, too much space and it will reduce too much and might burn. I made this in Staub’s 34 x 24 cm roasting dish (their largest size, for my American readers who shop for theirs in inches) so use it as a visual guide; whilst it was good for 5 thighs, it would be good for 6 too. I’d opt for something smaller if you were cooking only 4.