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Ohio Buckeye Chicken
- Intermediate
- 75 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with a sweet edge rounding the corners, acid holding everything up to the light, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 8 chicken thighs, bone-in
- 2 tbsp oil
- 1 onion, diced
- 3 garlic cloves, minced
- 250ml chicken stock
- 250ml apple cider
- 2 tbsp cider vinegar
- 2 tbsp brown sugar
- 1 tbsp mustard
- 1 tsp thyme
- Salt and pepper
The skills inside
Deglazing & pan saucesReducing a sauceSearing: the hard crustSweating aromatics: soft, never browned
Allergen screen
Found: mustard
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
- Season and brown the chicken thighs skin-side down until deeply gold; set aside.
- Sweat the onion and garlic in the fat until soft.
- Add the stock, cider, vinegar, brown sugar, mustard, and thyme and scrape up the fond.
- Return the chicken skin-side up, cover, and simmer 30 min. Uncover and reduce the sauce 10 min more until glossy. 30 min
- Season and serve with the pan sauce over mashed potatoes.
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.
Deglazing & pan sauces 49 recipes
- The pan still holds its fond. Nothing has been rinsed, wiped, or soaked, and the browned layer is intact on the floor.
- Excess fat was poured off first and the browned layer left behind; the fat is not the flavour and a sauce carrying all of it will not come together.
- The liquid went into a still-hot pan and the floor came clean: scraped while it bubbles, the base goes from stuck brown to bare metal and the sauce darkens as it takes it up.
- The fond was brown and not black. A burnt floor dissolves into bitterness that cannot be seasoned out, and is better washed away than deglazed.
- Reduced first and seasoned afterwards, tasted at the consistency it will be served at rather than at the start.
Where it goes wrong The pan was left to stand and go cold before anybody came back to it. Cold fond will not dissolve, so the scraping lifts nothing, and the sauce arrives thin and pale with the flavour it was supposed to carry still welded to the metal.
Reducing a sauce 95 recipes
- A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
- Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
- Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
- Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.
Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Pinot Noir or Gamay
- Also Right
- Chenin Blanc
- From the Taps
- Bière de garde
- Zero-Proof
- Verbena iced tea
Chicken is wine’s most agreeable partner. Match the SAUCE, not the bird: cream to oak, tomato to Sangiovese’s acid, herbs to Loire whites.
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