South Carolina · Main
Bog-Style Chicken and Rice
- Intermediate
- 1 h 30 m
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with wood-smoke running underneath, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, with warmth in the tail.
Ingredients
- 1 whole chicken, about 1.6kg
- 300g smoked sausage, sliced
- 2 onions, diced
- 3 celery ribs, diced
- 400g long-grain rice
- 1.5L chicken stock
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 tsp thyme
- Salt, black pepper, and cayenne
- Scallions
The skills inside
Sweating aromatics: soft, never brownedRendering fat: and cooking in what runs outKeeping the cooking liquid
Allergen screen
Found: celery
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Simmer the chicken in the stock 45 min until tender. Lift out, pull the meat, and keep the broth. 45 min
- Brown the sausage in the pot, then sweat the onion and celery in the rendered fat.
- Add the rice and stir 1 min, then add the measured broth, bay, and thyme. 1 min
- Return the chicken meat, cover, and cook on low 20 min until the rice is tender and wet. 20 min
- Rest 10 min. A bog is meant to be moist, not dry: season well and finish with scallions. 10 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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