Working at Food52 has many advantages, one of the more important ones being that I am surrounded by people who love food as much as I do. Every day, new recipes inspire me (and getting to taste all of the recipes is a real treat.
Most of the time, an innovative technique from the test kitchen propels me to try something new and different. (A lot of these experiments haven’t shown up on my blog yet because the downside of starting a new job is that you have very little energy at the end of the day, especially not for standing on chairs and navigating your tiny kitchen to photograph food. And then write about it. 😬)
However a recent recipe from Emma Laperruque’s Big Little Recipes franchise sent me the other way: racing to try a classic recipe that’s been done a million times, by Ina and Nigella and Martha and countless others. But never by ME. Emma took the classic chicken with 40 cloves of garlic and applied it to pot roast. It was delicious, and I can’t wait to revisit when I look like this.
But it reminded me that I have yet to make the classic version, a mistake that I rectified immediately. In choosing a recipe to follow, I found myself torn: there are so many versions, and they all look delicious. Do I go with my queen Ina? Or the Leite’s Culinaria version, which has roasted potatoes in the mix? Or this one from Marian Burros, which skips the fussy (and messy) “brown the chicken on the stove” step?
But then I spotted the game changer. In Nigella’s version, you don’t have to actually peel 40 cloves of garlic. As much as I love a good finicky meditative? kitchen project, I’d prefer for my hands not to smell like garlic for the rest of my days, so Nigella it was.
The recipe itself is fairly straightforward, at least for someone who makes as much chicken as I do. Brown, roast with aromatics, devour. I added some extra wine (duh.) and chicken stock prior to roasting so that there’d be more of a “pan” sauce afterwards, and let me tell you: I’ve never felt more sad to not have baguette at home than when the sauce came out of the oven and I had nothing to slather it on. (Have I learned nothing from my travels in France??)
I love chicken and I love garlic, so I knew that I would like this dish. But I never realized how much I would like it. My apartment smelled wonderful, so much so that I want to bottle up the scent and sell it in candle form. The garlic cloves mellow as they roast, becoming slightly sweet but intensely savory during their time in the oven. The little cloves become soft and almost jammy, and let me tell you, not being able to squish them out of their wrappers and spread them on toast was really sad. I ended up buying bread and doing this on Day 2, and while it was delicious, it was nothing like when they were fresh out of the oven. (I won’t tell you how many garlic cloves I ate sans accoutrement on that first night, only that if I had encountered any vampires, I would have been safe).
Print
Yield:
Print
PinIngredients
- 2 tablespoons regular olive oil
- 8 chicken thighs (with skin on and bone in), preferably organic
- 2 shallots, diced
- 8–10 sprigs fresh thyme (I didn’t have this, so I used 1 teaspoon of dried thyme instead)
- 40 cloves garlic (approximately 3 to 4 heads), unpeeled but papery excess removed
- 1/4 cup dry white vermouth or white wine
- 1/4 cup low-sodium chicken stock
- kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350F.
- In a wide* Dutch oven, heat the oil on medium-high heat. Season the chicken liberally on both sides with salt and pepper. Then, working in batches, sear the chicken on both sides, starting skin-side down and flipping only once the skin is bronzed and golden, and releases itself without sticking. (If it’s stuck, wait a minute — the skin will naturally unstick itself when it’s nicely browned.) Set aside once seared.
- Once you’ve finished searing your chicken, transfer the chicken fat and olive oil that’s in the Dutch oven to a small bowl (this keeps your chicken from being too greasy later). Heat 2 tablespoons of the rendered fat in the Dutch oven, and saute the diced shallots until translucent. Add the thyme and cook for an additional minute or two, then remove the Dutch oven from the heat.
- Place half of the garlic cloves into the Dutch oven, then layer the chicken pieces (skin-side up) over top, along with any chicken juices from your resting plate. Scatter the remaining garlic cloves on top.
- Add the white vermouth or wine, and the chicken stock. Sprinkle with a bit more salt and pepper, and additional sprigs of thyme. Cover and cook for 1-1/2 hours. Serve with something green and lots of toasted baguette to soak up all that garlicky-chickeny sauce.
Notes
- *You’ll want to ultimately fit all of the chicken in a single layer (I just barely managed this in my 4-quart round cocotte), so choose a pot wide enough for this. If you don’t have one, you can transfer the chicken to a 9-x-13 baking dish and line tightly with foil for the baking part of the recipe.
- Recipe from Nigella Lawson
Leave a Reply