I saw Jamie (AntiChef) make this and went looking for recipes online for it. It just so happened that one of them was from RecipeTin Eats, wherein she said she'd included it in her book. Which I just happened to get for my birthday ;)
So 1.6kg chicken pieces, cream, white wine, butter, stock, onion, garlic, thyme, bay leaf, mushrooms, flour, salt and pepper.
Mise en place. Took me over half an hour to get to this point.
First step is to brown the chicken in butter. I think maybe I had the temperature up a little too hot as it blackened slightly before going golden.
Also, butter goes *everywhere*. I used the smaller frying pan because it has a lid, but the smaller of the large hobs is close to the front, so butter went all over the floor too #grunt.
In the end I realised it wasn't all going to fit anyway, so I made the sauce separately over the back.
The mushroom and white wine sauce.
You're meant to simmer covered for a while, then uncovered for a while.
Then take the chicken out and simmer some more.
And put it all back together again.
I tried to keep two of the pieces "above the water" so they'd stay crispy. The problem was those two pieces didn't quite cook properly.
After taking this photo and cutting into the chicken we realised those two top pieces weren't cooked properly, so we had to swap them out for ones that had been fully immersed the whole time.
The verdict? Well it was nice, but it took two hours from start to finish and I found the sauce quite watery. Probably needed to reduce it some more. And I found it very fiddly. I'd make it again but I'd experiment with different ways of doing it so it wasn't quite so *fussy*. I'd also consider just doing chicken thighs the way I normally do them - just slice and fry them, and just add the sauce at the end.
The next night I made another creamy mushroom sauce with most of the same ingredients, just with no white wine since we didn't have any. But I made it the way I would normally do it - less watery and more reduced. It was thicker and creamier, as you can see with the big dollop up the top :)
Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Me: yes, but I'd modify the method somewhat, and I wouldn't be caring as much about measurements
Stu: he said it was "interesting" - he liked the chicken thighs but also found it too watery
Comments