Cava-Style Chicken
Chicken thighs in a harissa marinade — lemon, honey, garlic, paprika, and cumin — baked in the oven and finished under the broiler. The honey and the harissa do most of the work: it browns hard at the edges and stays juicy in the middle. Built for lunches, over rice or salad or in a pita.
Ingredients
Marinade
Instructions
- Whisk the harissa, olive oil, lemon juice, honey, garlic, paprika, cumin, and pepper together in a bowl or zip-top bag.
- Add the thighs and turn to coat every surface. Refrigerate at least 30 min; 2 to 4 hours is better.
- Heat the oven to 400°. Arrange the thighs on a foil-lined sheet pan, spaced apart, and pour any marinade left in the bag over them.
- Bake 20–25 min, flipping once at 10–12 min, until the thickest part reads 165°.
- Broil 2–3 min for color. Watch it — the honey goes from browned to burnt fast.
- Rest 5 min before slicing.
Notes
- Thighs, not breasts. They hold up to the broiler and to five days in the fridge; breast meat dries out on both counts.
- Space the pieces out on the pan. Crowded, they steam in their own juices and never brown, which wastes the honey in the marinade.
- Foil-line the pan. Honey plus harissa welds itself to bare metal.
- Marinate up to overnight but not much past it — the lemon juice starts working on the texture of the meat.
- The harissa sets the heat. Uses homemade harissa paste; a hot commercial one at 2 Tbsp. is a lot.
- No salt in the marinade, on purpose. The harissa is already salted, and this chicken is built for bowls that also carry feta, hummus, tzatziki, and tahini — the salt was stacking on top of four other salty things. A serving lands around 185 mg of sodium instead of the ~735 mg a teaspoon of salt would make it, which is close to 1,000 mg per bowl at the prep-batch scale.
- Add 1 tsp. of salt per pound back if you're eating it plain — over rice, in a pita, with nothing else going on. On its own it does read flat without it.
- What the salt was quietly doing is brining: it helps the meat hold moisture. Thighs at 400° are forgiving enough that skipping it barely shows, but breasts would notice.
- The pan juices are worth keeping. Spoon them back over the sliced chicken instead of leaving them on the foil.
- Good with lemon herb tahini and cucumber tomato salad — that's the whole CAVA bowl.
Meal prep
- Scale to the week: 3 lb. of thighs, which is a generous portion across 5–6 lunches. Triple the marinade — 6 Tbsp. each harissa and olive oil, 3 Tbsp. each lemon juice and honey, 3 garlic cloves, and 1 Tbsp. each paprika, cumin, and pepper. Two sheet pans, not one crowded one.
- Cook it whole on prep day, rest, then cool before it goes in containers. Sealing it warm steams the crust off.
- Store it sliced or whole? Whole. Sliced chicken dries out much faster; two minutes with a knife at lunch is worth it.
- The whole batch keeps in the fridge, airtight, for the full week here. Most sources say 3–4 days for cooked chicken; left whole rather than sliced, coated in an acidic lemon-and-harissa marinade, it has held up through day six. Freezing portions is the conservative version if a batch ever runs long — 2 months frozen.
- Reheat in a skillet with a little olive oil, about 5 min, which re-crisps the edges. Microwave under a damp paper towel, 1–2 min, works but goes soft.
- Marinating is the only step with a wait in it, so start it first and cut the salad while it sits.
Nutrition
- Serving size
- 1/3 of the recipe, about 5 oz. cooked
- Calories
- 287
- Protein
- 30 g
- Fat
- 14 g
- Saturated fat
- 2.5 g
- Carbohydrates
- 8 g
- Fiber
- 1.5 g
- Sugar
- 6 g
- Sodium
- 185 mg
- Cholesterol
- 141 mg
Estimated from the ingredient list, per serving. Not a substitute for a label.