Chicken Fajitas are my favorite Mexican dish. Part of the reason for this is that I do not know a lot of Mexican dishes 😉 and I have never actually been to Mexico. My first introduction to chicken fajitas was … Continue reading Homemade Chicken Fajitas
I’ve never seen ravioli with a chicken filling before, but I couldn’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t be nice so I decided to give it a try. I used a good quality free-range chicken with a lot of flavor, cooked the legs sous-vide for the filling and used the rest to make a chicken demi-glace (reduced stock) for the sauce. You could also just braise the chicken legs instead, so it is not needed to own a sous-vide cooker to be able to give this a try. The chicken ravioli turned out just like the name suggests, with a good chicken flavor. The concentrated flavor of the sauce helped to get this effect. If you like chicken, you’ll love these ravioli. Here’s what I did… Continue reading “Chicken Ravioli with Sage”
Another post from my cooking on a boat adventure. Paella is a great dish to cook for a large group, and I had borrowed a wonderful paella pan with dedicated burner. But what about stock? The stock is an important aspect of paella, which should be made from scratch rather than using bouillon cubes. Chicken stock and fish stock are obvious choices for paella, but where to get sufficient chicken or fish bones when on a boat trip?
The answer I came up with is that on the evening prior to cooking the paella, we prepared rotisserie chicken. After eating them, all the bones were collected in a big pot and those were used to make a stock. We also made shrimp stock from the heads and shells of the jumbo shrimp used for the paella, and used the cooking liquid from the mussels. A good cook never throws away something that still has flavor in it that can be used! Continue reading “Paella made with Stock from Rotisserie Chicken Leftovers”
This summer we’re going boating for 10 days with a group of around 30 friends, and I’m going to be the chef on board. For this trip I’m trying out some tasty, healthy and budget-conscious versions of Dutch favorites such as shawarma and in this case nasi with chicken satay. Nasi goreng is one of Indonesia’s national dishes that means “fried rice”. Indonesian food as it is eaten in the Netherlands clearly has Indonesian origins, but has been “Dutchified” and is known simply as “nasi”. Even in Indonesia there is no official recipe for nasi goreng, as its origins are related to a way to preserve left-over rice and other left-over foods by frying them. I’m by no means claiming that this version is authentic, far from it. But it sure is good!
Continue reading “Dutch Nasi Goreng with Chicken Satay and Atjar”
A week ago we launched the international “Shanghai Chicken” blogging project together with Clayton and John. The rules we set for this project were very simple:
So far not only Clayton and John/Sybaritica, but also Genie/Bunny Eats Design and Paul/That Other Cooking Blog have posted their takes on Shanghai Chicken. It is very interesting to notice how all of their entries are very different. Some more bloggers have announced that they will participate. I plan to do a wrap up of all the entries received so far next week. You can participate whenever you like, but if you want to be listed in my initial wrap up you should post something by Saturday, June 22, at the latest.
Here’s my own take on Shanghai Chicken. Continue reading “My Entry for the International “Shanghai Chicken” Project”
When I saw Richard’s post on Chicken Piccata, I knew I had to make this with veal scaloppine. Piccata is a classic dish from Lombardia that is traditionally made with veal, but can also be made with chicken or turkey … Continue reading Veal Piccata (Piccata di Vitello)
You may not believe this, but until recently I did not own a pressure cooker. I didn’t know much about pressure cookers and I never really saw the need for one. I knew a pressure cooker cooks at a higher temperature in a shorter time, but since I’m mostly interested in cooking at a lower temperature at a longer time (such as sous-vide), that doesn’t seem very appealing to me. After some of my gourmet friends told me that it really worked better for making stock, I decided to buy one. Of course the first thing to try it with was homemade stock. Is a pressure cooker really better for making stock? Time for another side-by-side experiment! Continue reading “Is a Pressure Cooker better for making Stock?”
Chicken and tarragon are a classic combination in French cuisine: Poulet à l’Estragon. In this recipe the chicken breast is seasoned with paprika and served with a sauce made from chicken stock, white wine, shallots, and tarragon. The tarragon sauce was nice, although I may have used a bit too much tarragon as it overpowered the chicken just a bit.
Continue reading “Chicken Breast with Tarragon Sous-Vide”
Coq au Vin was ‘invented’ to turn a tough old rooster into a feast. Nowadays it is hard to find such tough old roosters, and most Coq au Vin is made with chickens that have only lived to be about six weeks old. They do not really require to be simmered for a long time in red wine to become edible, and have a lot less flavor. Coq au Vin is still good anyway. If you are looking for a good Coq au Vin recipe for regular chicken, click here.
After I had discovered a type of free range chicken that is allowed to grow more slowly and thus develop more flavor, which reminded me of my grandmother’s chicken, I was curious how it would work when served as Coq au Vin. My parents were coming over for dinner and they had dropped some hints that they were curious about the “kip van tante Ali” I had found. And so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and prepare that type of chicken sous-vide, served as Coq au Vin. Continue reading “Coq au Vin Sous-Vide”
Kung Pao Chicken is a dish I’ve discovered only recently because it is not on menus of Chinese restaurants or take-out places in the Netherlands. ‘Chinese’ restaurants in this country are in fact Chinese-Indonesian, the chefs are mostly trained in the Netherlands at the same school, and the menus of those restaurants are mostly all the same and have been like that for thirty years. I’ve never been to China and am certainly not a connaisseur of Chinese food, but I do know that this is healthy, very tasty, and quite fast and easy to make. Kung Pao Chicken is a stir-fry dish that originated in Szechuan cuisine, containing chicken, peanuts (or cashews), vegetables, (dried) chile peppers, and Sichuan peppercorns. The latter are not actual peppercorns but the husk around the seeds of a type of prickley ash. Continue reading “Kung Pao Chicken”
Good quality chicken is often sold as whole chickens. I take off the legs and breast, and use the rest to make stock. When making stock from bones, chefs differentiate between ‘white’ stock and ‘brown’ stock. The difference is that white stock is made from raw or blanched bones, whereas for brown stock the bones are roasted first. Brown stock has a more rich, fuller flavor than white stock. For the best Coq au Vin sauce, it is best to use a brown stock. Since I posted about Coq au Vin the other day, I thought I’d share a recipe for brown chicken stock with you. Please note that I did not include salt in the recipe because it is never a good idea to add salt to stock before you know what you are going to do with it. You may have to simmer the stock down to make a sauce, and then it may end up too salty. Continue reading “Brown Chicken Stock”
Coq au Vin is a prime example of classic French cooking. It is a lot of work, but worth it. “Coq” is French for rooster, and in times when people still ate roosters they were old and thus so tough that they needed to be stewed in wine to make them edible. Nowadays most chicken only gets to live about 6 weeks, so it is not needed to cook it like that anymore. But the flavor of the classic dish is so good that people keep making it anyway. Those old roosters had a lot of flavor, so this dish will benefit from using an older chicken like the one I discovered recently.
I have looked at various recipes online, most of them in French, and noted that they are all very similar. Chicken is browned, covered in red wine and stock, and then stewed until tender. It is served with sautéed mushrooms and braised pearl onions. Since Julia Child has been very important for introducing French cuisine to America, I thought it would be nice to follow her recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She made some adaptations to ingredients available in America, for instance she cooks the chicken only for a short time (because young chickens don’t need that long) and she blanches the bacon before using it (I think this is because bacon in America was — or still is? — too salty).
I believe the key success factors for a good Coq au Vin are: the quality of the wine, the quality of the chicken, the quality of the chicken stock, and cooking the onions and mushrooms separately and only adding them at the end. This will allow the mushrooms and onions to keep their own flavor. If you’ve never made braised onions before, I bet you’ll like them so much that you will make them again. Braised onions are very tender, flavorful, and sweet, and very different from raw or sautéed onions. Continue reading “Coq au Vin”
Most people associate Chicken Ramen with instant noodles in a foam cup. You just need to add boiling water and it’s done. It doesn’t taste bad, but it is very different from the chicken ramen that I prepared today. I made everything from scratch, including the chicken broth and the noodles. Instead of cooking the chicken sous-vide like I did in my previous post about chicken ramen, I wanted to show you how you can approach the same result by cooking the chicken at a low temperature (between 65C and 70C or between 150F and 160F) and then taking the chicken meat off the bones and finish making the broth Making ramen noodles from scratch is just like making fresh Italian noodles, with the exception that baking soda is added to make the noodles alkaline (i.e. the opposite of acidic). This will give them a firmer texture when they are cooked in the broth.
I was very happy with the result. The broth had a very nice flavor, the chicken was tender and juicy, and the noodles had a nice texture. It takes a lot of time, but most if it is inactive so this is a great project for a rainy Sunday. Continue reading “Chicken Ramen From Scratch”
Almost a year ago I wrote about my quest to recreate the braised chicken like my grandmother used to make. Most people have nostalgic memories of a favorite food made by their mother or grandmother. Just the smell of it will instantly propel you back to your childhood. In many cases the memory has been romanticized by our brains and it may therefore seem impossible to recreate it. For me, this was the braised chicken my grandmother made. Her husband, my grandfather, was the only one who had left the family farm, where his brothers and sister kept livestock including … Continue reading My Grandmother’s Chicken Sous-Vide
Quesadillas make me think of summer, and even though it is in the middle of winter with snow and everything, I decided to make chicken quesadillas just to bring a bit of summer to our table. I based this on a post by Cher aka The Pasta Princess. Thanks for inspiring me to make this! Quesadillas are quite easy to make and great if you like cheese. Yes, the “quesa” in the name refers to the Spanish for cheese (queso). We both love cheese, so it is strange that I had not made these before. I definitely will be making … Continue reading Chicken Quesadillas
Cordon Bleu was one of my favorite dishes as a kid. I hadn’t eaten it for years, but when I was thinking about what to do with the organic chicken breast I had left from the whole chicken I had used to make brodo for tortellini, I decided it would be nice to make cordon bleu again. It can’t be a surprise that cordon bleu is really good if made from scratch with good chicken, good ham, and good cheese. It is quite different from something store-bought where the ham, cheese, and chicken are probably all of the ‘processed’ variety. Cordon … Continue reading Chicken Cordon Bleu
The criteria for great deep fried chicken are easy: the crust should be crispy and light, the chicken should be tender and succulent. With a few simple tricks it is possible to achieve this every time: Use wings or drum … Continue reading Crispy Deep Fried Chicken
My favorite recipes are simple and elegant. The less ingredients, the better. When I recently blogged about my first homemade batch of clarified butter, Richard McGary commented “Now that you have your clarified butter, if you want to try something, get a boneless, skinless chicken breast; season it with a little salt and pepper; bread it in bread crumbs from fresh bread, not stale or dried bread; and sauté it in the clarified butter. This is a remarkably simple technique with minimal seasoning but the flavor you will get with the butter and bread coupled with the moist chicken is mind … Continue reading REMCook’s Breaded Chicken Breast Fried in Claried Butter
This is one of my favorite dishes from “Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art” that is surprisingly easy to make and absolutely delicious. As often in Japanese and Italian cooking, the key is in the quality of the ingredients. I used very fresh line-caught sea bass from the North Sea. You just wrap the ingredients in foil and cookt them in a hot oven for a bit, that’s all! It may not look like much in the photo, but you better believe me that the taste is outstanding. I adapted the recipe and made it even more simple, since there is … Continue reading Japanese Mixed Grill
Some believe that I only eat food at the level of Alinea, or at least cooked sous-vide. But since one does have to eat, I do adjust to the circumstances and, depending on the circumstances, will eat almost everything. As we are currently touring national parks in Utah and Wyoming with an RV, quite some adjustment is necessary. Luckily I can enjoy what I’m eating anyway. The burners in the RV are so bad that it takes 15 minutes to bring half a liter (2 cups) of water to a boil. So cooking on those is out. But at the campsite in … Continue reading Improvised Chicken Fajitas
One of the first Japanese foods I fell in love with was teriyaki and yakitori. Yakitori actually just means grilled chicken in Japanese (yaki = broil or grill, tori = chicken), whereas Teriyaki means grilled & glazed (teri = gloss or luster, yaki = broil or grill). Teriyaki can be used for different types of meat or seafood, where yakitori is obviously always chicken. The sauces used to make them are very similar, with Japanese soy sauce, mirin (sweet sake), sake, and sugar as the main ingredients. The main difference between chicken teriyaki and yakitori is that yakitori is grilled … Continue reading Easy Chicken Yakitori from the BBQ
I’ve been trying more recipes from Shizuo Tsuji’s great “Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art”. Since I had some left-over dashi, I decided to make two dishes that require dashi. I am not sure if this would be served together in Japan, but it did taste well together and I was well pleased with the result. I pre-cooked the chicken sous-vide for an easier way to get chicken that is cooked through (and pasteurized) as well as juicy, but the original recipe doesn’t require that so you can also make this without sous-vide equipment. The recipes make use of light Japanese … Continue reading Japanese Fried Chicken, Drenched Daikon and Noodles in Broth
Since it’s K.’s birthday today, I thought it would be appropriate to blog about a recipe from her blog $35 a week that I tried. Thanks for the recipe and happy birthday! The recipe she used asks for a slowcooker, so I couldn’t resist to use sous-vide instead. I had never made ramen myself before. The chicken came out very juicy and tender and I was happy with the overall result. I do wonder whether you actually need a slowcooker (or sous-vide setup) to make something just as good, so that’s something to try next time. I’ll just sauté the chicken … Continue reading Chicken Ramen sous-vide
Some weeks ago I wrote about my attempts to recreate the memory of my grandmother’s braised chicken. I came pretty close by cooking a stewing hen sous-vide at 64C/147F for 3 days, but I was not completely satisfied with the result yet. In the meantime I have done two new experiments with chicken from the same source, once at 62C/144F and once at 60C/140F. Just a short post today to give you an update of the results. Even after cooking sous-vide for over 16 months now, the difference of only 2C/4F degrees still amazes me. I’ve decided that 62C/144F for … Continue reading Quest for my Grandmother’s Chicken, Part 2
Most people have nostalgic memories of a favorite food made by their mother or grandmother. Just the smell of it will instantly propel you back to your childhood. In many cases the memory has been romanticized by our brains and it may therefore seem impossible to recreate it. For me, this was the braised chicken my grandmother made. Her husband, my grandfather, was the only one who had left the family farm, where his brothers and sister kept livestock including chickens long past retirement age. This included chickens, the original ‘organic’ kind, running around freely in the yard scavenging for … Continue reading Quest for my Grandmother’s Chicken, Part 1
My favorite Japanese cookbook is “Japanese cooking: a simple art” by Shizuo Tsuji. Since some ingredients are hard to come by outside of Japan and because I don’t have a very good reference (unlike Italian food, in many cases I don’t have a clue what it is supposed to taste like) I haven’t cooked as much out of this book as I would like to. One of my favorite recipes from the book that I have cooked many times before is the chicken loaf. Here I’ve served it with roasted eggplant, a ginger-soy dipping sauce and Japanese rice. This recipe … Continue reading Japanese Chicken loaf with Eggplant and Ginger
Until today I had never heard of Chicken Adobo, but thanks to this post in which Cristina calls Chicken Adobo her favorite Asian chicken dish ever, I decided to give it a try and now it is my favorite ever Asian … Continue reading Chicken Adobo sous-vide
This is the first Italian-style dish that I created myself and I’m still making it on a regular basis because it’s so good. It’s not authentic and the odds are against me that an Italian would ever make a similar dish, but who cares as long as it’s good 😉 This is simple home cooking and not haute cuisine. I created this dish in the late nineties because I thought that since pesto goes well with chicken, pesto goes well with haricots verts and pesto goes well with sundried tomatoes, the combination of all of them should be nice. And … Continue reading Pasta with chicken, pesto, haricots verts, and sundried tomatoes
Whenever I buy a whole chicken, I always prepare the legs and the breast separate because otherwise I end up with a dry breast or undercooked legs. I recommend to buy a free-range chicken, but don’t spend your money on … Continue reading Simple sous-vide chicken leg with crispy skin
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