The French Basque & Gascony · Main
Poulet Basquaise
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, aromatics blooming from the first bite, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 1 chicken of 1.6 kg, jointed into 8
- 30 g duck fat
- 100 g jambon de Bayonne, cut in 5 mm lardons
- 450 g piments doux verts, in 1 cm strips
- 300 g red peppers, in 1 cm strips
- 250 g onions, sliced
- 4 garlic cloves, sliced
- 500 g tomatoes, peeled and chopped
- 150 ml dry white Irouléguy or another crisp white
- 2 tsp piment d'Espelette
- 1 bay leaf and 2 thyme sprigs
- salt
The skills inside
Deglazing & pan saucesReducing a sauceRendering fat: and cooking in what runs out
The words inside
Jambon de Bayonne & French Whole-Muscle Hams
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
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
- Salt the chicken and lay it skin down in the duck fat over medium heat; leave it until the skin is deep gold and lifts from the pan by itself, then set it aside.
- Render the ham lardons in the same fat, then add the onions and both peppers and cook until they have collapsed and the edges are catching brown.
- Stir in the garlic and Espelette for thirty seconds, until the fat stains red and smells sweet, then deglaze with the wine and reduce until the pan smells of wine and not of alcohol.
- Add the tomatoes and herbs, return the legs and thighs so the skin stands proud of the sauce, and simmer bare and gentle for 25 minutes. 25 min
- Tuck in the breast pieces for the last 12 minutes, until the juices at the thigh joint run clear and the flesh pulls from the bone with a little coaxing. Rest off the heat for 10 minutes. 12 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.
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.
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
- Pinot Noir (the classic)
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais (Morgon)
- From the Taps
- Belgian dubbel
- Zero-Proof
- Black cherry spritz
Acid and silk against duck fat: the oldest marriage in Burgundy, with Gamay as its cheerful younger witness.
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