dragonlady7

post, i know this is long but listen at least there's not a story about my feelings first

via https://ift.tt/3eK6cZ6

So here’s the thing. This isn’t really strictly a recipe. This is more a technique. And it doesn’t have to be paprikash. I just had read a paprikash recipe most recently the last time I decided to start messing with this method again, so that’s where I went.

Of course, the ancestor of this whole process is the Cooking Chicken, Laziest Method https://walburgablack.tumblr.com/post/172860398659/cooking-chicken-laziest-method post that walburgablack https://tmblr.co/mPSCy-S2SJzeGUWSIaJgc6g was kind enough to write out for me when I asked about how Indian cooking works, whew, two years ago now. (Notes on that post: garlic cloves are smaller in India, so use 5-6 American-sized ones; “curd” is a dairy thing and Americans could use yogurt if they wanted; I usually use a lemon juice or somesuch.) (Another note: it’s chicken because I work on a chicken farm. If you want to cook something else, well, you’re on your own, I happen to have a freezer full of rejected chicken parts, but later this winter I’m sure I’ll have to go back to grocery store meat so maybe I’ll come up with some alternatives.)

I’m very sorry if you’re the sort of person who needs precise measurements and amounts of everything, because I used to be like that and still am when I try something new, but that’s not how this recipe works– my greatest successes have been when I’ve let the size of my pan dictate quantities. Because where I’m specializing away from the recipe above is that I’m cooking bone-in, skin-on hunks of chicken with the aim of getting the skin somewhat crispy in places. So what you’re aiming for, regardless of which vegetables you use, regardless of which seasonings you use, is that the chicken is going to nestle skin-side-up in the pan, resting on the vegetables, with the liquid coming slightly up the sides of it but the top of it exposed to the hot oven.

So I’m calling this paprikash, but I’ve made it with garam masala and tomato for a curry kind of dish, and I’ve made it with broth and adding dairy at the end for paprikash, and I’ve made it with assorted farm herbs for an untitled sort of joint, so really it’s the technique I’m explaining here.

cut for length

This could probably be simplified, but what equipment I wind up using is a big cast iron pan (a skillet seems to work best) and a cookie sheet or jelly roll pan or something. (I use a 15″ skillet at home, and at the farm there is a ridiculous cast iron pan that must be 25″ across, and I use that for crew lunches.)

You also, for paprikash, want to get a pot of egg noodles going, but you could also do rice, or mashed potatoes, or whatever starch on the side would suit your final meal concept depending on your spice choices here.

Ingredients are:

Enough bone-in, skin-on chicken parts for the people you’re serving. For ten people, I got two five-pound chickens and cut them roughly into parts. (When parting a chicken for this, try to cut pieces that are a reasonable size for a single serving.) For two people, I had a bag with about a dozen wings in it and used those. Stick some marinade on that chicken, something acidic, some salt and pepper, maybe some oil. I let it sit overnight sometimes, or even longer if I forget about it, but as little as half an hour will do. Just a little something to tenderize it a bit.

Vegetables: an onion for sure, and some garlic to taste, and then anything else you can find and saute. I categorize my vegetables into needs more cooking time vs needs less, but you could probably forego that. Needs more is the onion, celery, carrots; needs less is stuff like cabbage, bok choi, broccoli raab, peppers. For paprikash, a lot of peppers is a good way to go. walburgablack https://tmblr.co/mPSCy-S2SJzeGUWSIaJgc6g mentioned potatoes and a few of those diced fine would help thicken the sauce, which is no bad thing, I just didn’t have any today.

Liquid: Broth, or tomatoes, will do the trick. Hard to estimate what you’ll need; I just made this in a 15″ skillet and needed a bit less than 2 pints of good thick Trash Broth. (I’ll give that recipe some other time, it’s just chicken stock, mostly.)

Thickener: you could use flour or you could use some dairy or coconut milk or something. Depends what you’re going for, I’ll give directions for all three.

Process:

Melt some oil or lard or butter or ghee in your pan. Brown the chicken a little bit, just to give the skin a head start. Flip it once; I lightly salt each side while I’m doing this. Meanwhile get all your vegetables ready, cut up and nice.

Pull the chicken out, set aside (on the cookie sheet or plate or whatever), and put your vegetables in. I put in the onions and carrots first, let them soften a bit. Then put in the rest of the vegetables, and toss them around for a couple of minutes, and I sparingly add salt here too. Turn your oven on to preheat, to like 375 or 400 or so.

Now add your liquid to the pan– your tomatoes or your broth. You don’t want your vegetables submerged entirely– you’re not really making soup. Just a good two or three inches of liquid, so you can see it among the vegetables, deep enough that the chicken’s in it when you nestle it in there but not so much the chicken drowns in it.

Once the liquid has come to a boil, use some tongs and nestle your chicken in there, so that it’s got as much skin as possible sticking up out of the pan, but the meat is nestled down in there to get braised in the liquid. (I arranged my wings so the meaty parts were at the outer edge and the skinny burnable bits faced the middle and overlapped, but this was possibly more effort than was necessary.) [image description: uncooked chicken wings neatly arranged in a cast iron skillet, with red paprika dusted across them, nestled in a bed of chopped peppers mostly-submerged in broth.

(please note in this image that I had added a whole lot of paprika before I put the wings on, and this is just a cosmetic dusting of seasonings and not the entirety of the spices I used in this dish.)]

Now you add like, all the seasonings. For paprikash, it’s salt and pepper and More Paprika Than You’d Think You Need. For more Indian-style seasonings, well, you should have read the previous post and followed her advice to start off with your spices in the hot oil, and this is just where you add more, but ymmv, there are better explainers than this if you’re not sure how Indian cooking utilizes spices. Oh, and for the untitled farmhouse chicken dish, misc, I go out and harvest all the herbs I can find in the picking garden, and mince them fine and throw them in with the sauteeing vegetables or into the broth. (My bouquet is usually sage, thyme, and any of the following that strikes my fancy– lovage [sparingly!], tarragon, parsley, oregano, hyssop [NOT anise hyssop], basil, marjoram [if I want to annoy my sister, who hates it], summer savory, winter savory, chives– whatever’s available and looks good, really.) In the case of herbs, I’ll drip some lemon juice over the top of the chicken too maybe, to sharpen it a bit. Grated or finely-minced garlic applied directly to the top of the chicken is also a good idea here.

Stick the whole thing, uncovered, into the oven, for like half an hour to 45 minutes. Check on it to make sure it’s not drying out, after 20. (If it is you might be done, or you might want to add more broth or even just water; depends how done the chicken is and what’s available. Keep in mind your thickening method, which might also add moisture, and don’t make the dish too wet yet– you just need to make sure it’s wet enough that nothing burns.)

Take the chicken out with tongs and arrange it on your cookie sheet or jelly roll pan or whatever. Stick that back in the oven while you finish the dish; it will crisp up, the last of it will get done through, and it won’t have time to dry out. Poultry cooking temp is recommended at 165F, for reference; if you’re inexperienced at cooking with meat, a good thermometer is a fantastic tool in your arsenal.

Put the cast iron on the stovetop and bring the liquid to a boil, stirring to thicken. Now: method 1, get a good heatproof measuring cup, dip it in to get like half a cup of liquid out of the pan, whisk in like a tablespoon of flour, then mix that back into your dish. Simmer, stirring, 3-5 minutes to thicken. (optional: add milk at this stage.) (optional variant: take 1-2 Tbsp of soft butter, mash in 1-2 Tbsp of flour with a fork, then dump that into the sauce and stir. That works okay too.) method 2, turn the heat way down and add an appropriate amount of sour cream to the sauce, then gently bring it back up to heat to thicken it. method 3, dump a can of coconut milk in there and stir it around and simmer it gently and I never have much luck getting it to thicken but it tastes so good I don’t think anyone cares. variant: you could probably use heavy cream for this. I recommend one of the dairy or coconut methods if your peppers included hot ones, or if you’ve put in red pepper for a more Indian-style spice mix. I just like spice and cream together, that’s my whole motivation there. Full disclosure, I did the sour cream method tonight and didn’t have enough sour cream so it was sort of soupy. Eh, nobody minds that much. Mostly, this dish fails gracefully, except for getting really burnt, so it’s okay to not worry that much.

Now, pull your chicken out of the oven, and I leave it separate to serve so people can more easily pick their portion. I serve it in a pasta bowl so the pasta swims a bit in the sauce and the chicken gets sauce on it but the skin doesn’t get soggy.

Obviously, you’ll have to experiment to make sure this fits in your pan and your lifestyle and such. But this should be adaptible to basically any flavor of chicken you want to make in this style, where it’s a gravy-over-starch-with-meat kind of dish.

This usually takes me a bit more than an hour to do, including all cook time but not including the marinating the chicken.