Chicken forestière
One of those dishes that turns out better than you anticipate. A few dried wild mushrooms, a bag of carrots, some chicken thighs and a dash of cream. Simple ingredients that aren’t that expensive. But you end up with a bosky, luxurious panful.
Ingrediënten
- 20 g ¾oz dried wild mushrooms
- salt and pepper
- 8 skin-on bone-in chicken thighs
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 2 small onions halved and cut into thin crescent moon-shaped slices
- 75 ml 2½fl oz Madeira or, failing that, dry sherry
- 215 g 7½oz carrots, peeled and cut into batons
- 200 ml 7fl oz chicken stock
- 150 ml 5fl oz double cream
- 150 g 5½oz button or chestnut mushrooms, quartered
- 1 tbsp finely chopped flat-leaf parsley leaves
Instructies
- Season the thighs and heat the oil in a sauté pan.
- Cook the chicken on both sides to get a good brown colour.
- Don’t turn the pieces over until they can easily be moved, otherwise the skin will tear.
- You don’t need to cook the chicken through, you’re just getting a good colour.
- Remove the chicken from the pan and put in a dish.
- Pour off all but 1 tbsp of fat from the pan into a bowl (reserve this fat), but don’t wash the pan out.
- Heat the fat that remains in the pan and sauté the onions until soft and pale gold.
- Deglaze the pan with the alcohol, scraping with a wooden spoon to dislodge all the flavour from the base.
- Add the carrots and the stock, plus the wild mushrooms and their soaking liquor.
- Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer, cover and cook for 10 minutes.
- Return the chicken to the pan (together with any juices that have run out of it), placing it skin side up.
- Cover and cook gently for 20 minutes.
- Remove the lid, stir in the cream, return to a simmer again and cook for another 10 minutes with the lid off.
- In a separate pan, heat 1 tbsp of the reserved chicken fat and quickly sauté the mushrooms until they are golden brown.
- The mixture should be dry, so cook until the liquid in the mushrooms has evaporated.
- Season and toss in with the chicken, stirring gently to combine everything.
- The ‘sauce’ should be thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon.
- Taste for seasoning, though you shouldn’t need to adjust it (the reduced chicken stock is quite salty).
- Scatter on the parsley and serve from the pan in which it was cooked.
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