Chicken

Well Stuart has an excuse of a new job, I just haven't been posting lately, partly because I was traveling for a week, in which I got to enjoy my favorite eating locations in Champaign. But honestly I haven't cooked much new in a while.

Last night---it was a truly glorious day here in NYC, as it is again today---I cooked something for dinner real fast. I'm usually a little more deliberate than I was, so this was more of a hacking what I had in my kitchen than I normally do:

Two boneless skinless chicken breasts, butterflied and seasoned with lemon pepper, fresh lime juice and poultry seasoning. I browned them in a pan with some diced red onions, garlic, and sun dried tomatoes, then finished in a half cup of red wine and half cup of chicken broth. This got put on top of some freshly cooked rotini, with a little parmesan cheese.

It wasn't perfect... there was a little too much pasta, a little too much wine in the liquid relative to the chicken broth, but what the heck, it worked. Anyone else have a "what the heck, it worked" to share?

Today I sent my SousVide Supreme demo unit back. I had it for almost two weeks. While this gave me a chance to get a feel for the machine, it didn't really give me enough time to really see all of what sous vide - as a technique - has to offer.

Here's what I cooked:

• Fish: Just tilapia, unfortunately. Since I moved to Maryland from Illinois, I just haven't been taking advantage of the (significantly) greater availability of good seafood. I'm not sure why. Still, given how tender, moist, and flavorful the tilapia turned out, I'd definitely like to try more fish sous vide.
• Eggs: Some people don't really like the "perfect egg" that you can get with sous vide. They find the white too loose for their taste. This means there are more for me. (If only it worked that way...)
• Root Vegetables: I cooked some celeriac and sweet potatoes for purees. The celeriac, unfortunately, was my biggest failure with the machine. I tried using a regular zipper bag. It opened at some point in the cooking process, and my celeriac escaped into the water. It still tasted OK, but it was nothing special. The sweet potato, on the other hand, turned out incredibly well: smooth and deeply flavored. I added a bit of cumin and turmeric and tossed it in the blender.
• Beef: Despite some reservations voiced by others on this site, beef was the real standout here. Chuck roasts are amazingly flavorful cuts of beef, but they are also fairly tough. Chuck cooked for over 24 hours at about 132 degrees (medium-rare) turns out amazing. Image by ArnoldDue to the fact that the water bath never rises above your ideal core temperature, you can't overcook it. Given a long cooking time, though, the collagen dissolves. You are left with a steak that is perfectly cooked from edge to edge... and is just about as tender as any steak you've ever had. The fact that sous vide techniques allow you to make (cheap) chuck steaks that compare favorably with much more expensive cuts of beef is exciting. Apparently, short ribs turn out really well, too. The chuck was good enough, though, that I made it a couple of times in the short time I had the machine (despite the long cooking time).
• Lamb: The lamb was good. It didn't benefit quite as much from the low temperature cooking as the beef did, but I also didn't cook it nearly as long.
• Squid: I followed someone's notes on the Internet. They were wrong. My squid ended up a bit too tough, though it tasted good. I usually find squid to be very neutral tasting. This actually had a very nice flavor to it. Next time, I'd try squid a bit above 140 degrees for at least two hours.
• Chicken Breast: Tender. Moist. Too often, chicken (particularly white meat) doesn't taste like much. This didn't have that problem. It tasted like chicken... in a good way.

Things I didn't get a chance to experiment with: Too many to list.

I'd have loved, though, to have been able to experiment more with fruit, other vegetables, poultry (sous vide turkey, definitely. sous vide duck? It would be nice to try...), and more seafood (I think it would be really good for squid, if I knew the right temp to cook it at). I have no idea what sous vide could do (if anything) for nuts or cheeses. Can you bake in it? What would that do?

Whole chickens are a great bargain. If you just roast a chicken and set it out on the table to be picked clean, though, you're probably only going to get a single meal out of a chicken (maybe with some leftovers). With a bit of planning, you can make a single chicken go much farther than that.
Original image by Kai Hendry
How? Consider some of these options:

1. Roast the chicken with extra vegetables, infusing them with chicken flavor. Serve these vegetables with (or as) another meal (Need some ideas to get you started? Chicken-infused root vegetables can be pureed with a bit of cream and some stock to make a wonderful soup. Tomatoes and onions cooked alongside chicken become the basis of an amazing pasta sauce.)
2. Only serve the chicken pieces that people will eat and strip the carcass of the rest of its meat. Use this leftover meat as an accent in another meal. You can add it to a rice or pasta dish, use it for burrito or enchilada fillings, make chicken salad with it, the list is long...
3. Save the chicken carcass (removing the meat first) and use it (along with the neck and gizzards) to make chicken stock.
4. Remove some of the chicken skin and use it to make a pureed sauce for another meal. Yeah, it sounds weird, but it works surprisingly well.

Alternately, if you have an egg-laying chicken, you can get hundreds of meals from it...

Do you have any other money-saving tips for using a chicken? Post in the comments, below.

Ive been following They Go Really Well Together (TGRWT) for some time now. It began on Khymos as a group project in molecular gastronomy to test whether foods that shared key chemicals that contributed to their aroma or flavor would compliment each other. Each month, a different flavor combination is chosen by the (rotating) host, and people from around the web contribute their creations. This month's pairing is chicken and rose, and my contribution follows...

Dry Lavender Soda is part of a line of all-natural, low-sugar beverages. It has a distinct lavender flavor and, perhaps surprisingly, I discovered that it makes an awesome braising liquid for chicken.