Utah · Main
Utah Dutch Oven Chicken
- Intermediate
- 2 h
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with char used as punctuation, savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes.
Ingredients
- 1 chicken, cut in pieces
- 4 potatoes, chunked
- 4 carrots, chunked
- 2 onions, quartered
- 3 tbsp oil
- 250ml chicken stock
- 2 tbsp Worcestershire
- 1 tbsp paprika
- 1 tsp thyme
- Salt and pepper
Equipment
Dutch oven · Skillet · Grill
The skills inside
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Found: fish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
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Method
- Season and brown the chicken in a cast-iron Dutch oven over campfire coals or in the oven.
- Add the potatoes, carrots, and onions around the chicken.
- Pour in the stock and Worcestershire and season with paprika and thyme.
- Cover and set coals on the lid, or bake at 190C, for 60-75 min until the chicken and vegetables are tender. 75 min
- Rest and serve straight from the pot.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Searing: the hard crust 141 recipes
- The pan keeps a hard, steady sizzle from the moment the food lands and does not fall quiet; silence within the first half minute means the pan lost its heat and the surface is now steaming rather than browning.
- It releases itself when tested: slide a thin edge under and it lifts without tearing. Anything that grips the pan has not formed a crust yet and is not ready to be moved.
- Deep even brown across the whole face, edge to edge, when it is turned under the light: no pale ring left around a browned centre, and no black patches that taste bitter on their own.
- The pan floor carries a dry browned layer that dissolves and lifts the moment liquid hits it: not a wet grey film, and not black flecks that stay put and stay bitter.
- Cut into it: the browned band is thin, a few millimetres at most, sitting straight on top of correctly cooked interior; a thick grey collar under the crust means the heat was too low for too long.
Where it goes wrong The pan was not hot enough, or too much went in at once, so the food released its water and sat in it: the surface goes grey and steams, it sticks when moved, and the crust that eventually forms arrives over an interior already cooked through.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Pinot Noir or Gamay
- Also Right
- Chianti or Barbera
- 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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