So we’re suckers for chicken dishes. Chicken is cheap, plentiful, and delicious.
We’re also suckers for braising. You’d have to be with as many dutch ovens as we have. Braising lets you take an otherwise tough cut of meat and cook it low and slow in a bunch of yumminess until the fat has rendered out and left you with a fall-off-the-bone tender treat.
This week we made a braised chicken thigh dish called Chicken Canzanese (free registration required). We’d never heard of the dish before this recipe, but apparently it is an old recipe of indeterminate origins. After trying this, one can only imagine that Canzanese translates to deliciousness!
A lot of the usual suspects. Put good stuff in…. get good stuff out!
First step is bacon. All good things start with bacon.
Now, it's true, this recipe calls for prosciutto, and we used bacon instead. An enormous pet peeve of ours is when you are reading the commentary on a recipe and someone says “I hated this recipe. However, I changed about half of the steps and substituted a bunch of other ingredients.” Prosciutto is delicious awesome stuff, but we had bacon on hand, and it is a reasonable substitute.
We cut the bacon up French-style into lardons, and rendered them in our trusty dutch oven. We also sliced up some garlic into long thin slices (pictured later) and fried it in the bacon grease until golden brown.
Next step was trimming the chicken thighs. This should actually be the first step considering how long it can take, depending on how much of the fat you want to trim. Chicken thighs cook up nice and tender and retain their moisture (unlike chicken breast, which can easily over-cook).
The bacon and garlic were removed from the pot, and then we browned the chicken. All that chicken skin goes face down into the bacon grease to brown and render off a lot of the fat.
Mmm…look how nice and crispy they look! That golden color is pure crispy flavor.
We added some wine and broth to the pot, and then stirred in the aromatics: the reserved bacon & garlic from before, fresh sage, rosemary (that I stole from a neighbor’s front yard), bay leaves, clove, and red pepper flake.
Then it goes into the oven for a nice low and slow braise for a little over an hour.
Fresh out of the oven.
The chicken is removed, and the sauce is reduced some more over the stove. All that sauce becomes thickened and more concentrated.
***Let me be clear about this. This gravy is like crack. Chicken-flavored crack. Must stop blogging and go make more gravy***
And just to make it more special, we served the chicken on top of polenta (or grits). Much has been blogged in the past about polenta, so you can check that out here.
And there you have it. It was simple, the sauce is amazing, and it all just melts together in your mouth. We'll definitely be making this one again sometime!
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