Chef's Tasting

We just did a tasting for Phil and Deirdre Armstrong of Harvest Thyme Herb Farm in Staunton, VA, suppliers of herbs and vegetables to fine restaurants in the Staunton and Charlottesville area, as well as fellow bloggers. We wish we lived closer together so that we could work together.



Gravlax of Brook Trout. I'm a sucker for all kinds of cured and smoked fish, so when I got a delivery of way too many brookies, I decided to do a traditional salmon cure on some of them, hence the appropriation of the term gravlax. Garnishes are caperberries, dilled sour cream, red ribbon (aka blood) sorrel from the flats growing in our kitchen, and chervil which overwintered outside on the deck. I especially like the deep red color that the overwintered chervil takes on.

The crispy brown bits are parsnip crisps, something that we arrived at serendipitously. I love to serve smoked fish with latkes and we have been doing a lot of parnsip latkes lately. The night before the tasting, one of the cooks made a latke that was too big to fit onto the komatsuna garnish that I had already laid out on a plate, so I had him cut the latke down with a round cutter. That left all the crispy edge bits on the cutting board for chef snackies. The crispy edge bits were so good that we decided to do all crispy bits for the tasting.



Guinea Breast. We had a couple of guinea breasts laying around with no other use in mind, so we did a little ghetto sous vide on them and served them in a bowl of Surry sausage jus, with blanched Kentucky Wonder bean sprouts. Who knew you could eat baby bean plants? I sure as hell didn't think of it until Billie Clifton of Sunflower Cottage, our local microgreen supplier, brought some in a couple weeks back. To answer your question, they taste just like green beans. Go figure.



Porcini Carolina Gold Risotto with Wild Mushrooms, Guanciale, and Sage. We just had to do a wild mushroom course because we have wild mushrooms coming out of our ears now. It's been a great winter season for both black trumpets and hedgehogs. This is a really simple risotto of Anson Mills Carolina Gold rice, dried porcini, fresh sage from my home garden, and spectacular guanciale from La Quercia in Iowa. This is the last of my supply from La Quercia but even as good as it is, I'm looking forward to trying the guanciale from the home team in Manakin, VA, Olli Salumeria Americana. How cool is it to have two great suppliers of guanciale?

Garnishes are black trumpet mushrooms, hedgehog mushrooms, prosciutto crsips, fresh sage, and a cheese crisp made from porcini powder and pecorino Sardo. What you don't see in the photo is the barely poached quail egg beneath the robe of risotto. I love this trick. The egg yolk really enriches the risotto.



Pork Confit with Polenta Poblano Spoonbread and Salsa Verde. Ordinarily we don't do tomatillos out of season, but they were already in house from a very specific tasting that we did last weekend. I like to think of this dish as something you would get if your Southern grandma were of Mexican descent. It combines Southern classics spoonbread and fried green tomatoes with poblanos and salsa verde. And the crispy pork confit evokes carnitas, but the flavor is different because we used some orange zest and cognac in seasoning the pork before we cured it.

So what you see on the plate from left to right is a swoosh of salsa verde (poblanos, onions, tomatillos, cilantro, garlic), a fried green tomatillo, crispy pork confit threads, pimentón sauce (the orange sauce), and a cube of pork confit sitting on top of the spoonbread (leftover polenta, roasted poblano purée, cream, and eggs).



Bestilla of Border Springs Lamb. We get lambs in on a regular basis and tend to use the primary cuts (racks, loin chops, and legs) first. Then we end up with a lot of tiny foreshanks and necks in freezer after several months. That's when I get to braising, because braising is my favorite cooking technique and the neck and shank meat is the best meat on the lamb. This time, Craig's wonderful lamb ended up in a classic Moroccan tagine, a stew redolent of spices. I have made hundreds of tagines in my career and this was one of the best; I'm really honing in on just about the perfect spicing to showcase the lamb without overwhelming it. After braising, the lamb gets separated from the vegetables and the sauce. The lamb gets pulled and mixed back with the vegetables and the defatted and reduced sauce.

I wanted to showcase this beautiful pulled lamb, so I came pretty quickly to a classic bestilla. Rather than scramble eggs into the filling in the classic manner, I packed the pastries with lamb and buried a raw quail egg in the center, which then baked into a solid egg in the oven. We generally accompany our lamb tagine with chizu, a spicy carrot slaw. I wanted to use the chizu as a sauce and so we made a vinaigrette of it like we do with kimchee à la David Chang of Momofuku. Because of the high water content in the carrots, we had to use a touch of xanthan to bind the water and keep the vinaigrette from bleeding. The other sauce is a mixture of ras al hanout (an Arab spice mix) and Greek yogurt.

The salad garnish we called a winter salad. It consists of everything green that we could find, dressed with a preserved lemon vinaigrette. From what I remember, the salad contains brussels sprouts petals, tiny broccoli leaves, micro arugula, micro bulls blood beets, and chervil.



White Chocolate Goat Cheese Cheesecake with Sweet Potato, Almond, and Cranberry Florentine. I wanted to use sweet potatoes in the dessert course and it struck me to substitute them for the candied orange peel in a classic florentine, a crunchy cookie containing nuts and candied fruit glued together with honey, cream, and sugar. Florentines are often coated or drizzled with chocolate. We coated ours entirely with white chocolate and then used the Florentine as a crust for a white chocolate and goat cheese cheesecake. I've made hundreds if not thousands of cheesecakes in my life, but never with goat cheese, although that seems a pretty obvious thing to do. I enjoyed the goat cheese flavor; it reminded me of a panna cotta made with yogurt in which the acidity of the cheese/yogurt plays off the sugar to give a well balanced end result. Garnish is a drizzle of blueberry crème anglaise.

Veal- and Bluberry-Stuffed Quail

Been busy in the kitchen dreaming up new dishes for my weekly Chef's Table (5-7 courses $60 prix fixe including wine, Thursdays at 6pm, by reservation only). From last night, here's a quail stuffed with local veal and dried blueberries on watermelon radishes and mixed microgreens dressed with apple cider reduction dressing.

Turkey Wine

It's that time of the year when the phone starts ringing and the emails starting arriving. Everyone wants to know what wine to pair with turkey. Let me preface my answer with there is no single correct match; there are many acceptable matches; and that most people stress way too much about the subject.

And before I go any further, just let me state that Pinot Noir is the universal food wine. When in doubt, Pinot Noir.

Delving into the subject a bit further, you must realize that the turkey in itself does not drive the pairing decision, for it's about as mild a meat as you can encounter. Driving the pairing decision are all those myriad side dishes, some very aggressively seasoned and some very sweet or sweet and sour.

When in doubt, Pinot Noir.

With all the fruity sweet and sour going on at Thanksgiving, I like a wine that can stand up to the fruit. There are five categories of wine that I have paired very successfully with a full Thanksgiving meal and those are rosé, sparkling wine, fruity unoaked whites, lightly oaked light red wines, and fruit-forward reds.

Rosé. In general, rosé wines pair with a lot of difficult dishes; you'll find cranberry notes in many that will work well at Thanksgiving. And as most of these wines are made for immediate consumption, I like to empty my cooler of the remaining rosés of the current vintage at this time of year.

Sparkling Wine. Champagne is the LBD (little black dress) of the wine world. It's almost always appropriate and goes with so many things. But while Champagne works pretty well, the sweetness of a lot of Thanksgiving dishes may turn it a little sour or tinny, so I look to other more fruity bubblies this time of year. Now is the time to consider a gorgeous rosé Crémant d'Alsace, a sparkling Shiraz from down under, or a sparkling Chenin Blanc such as Vouvray.

Fruity Unoaked White. My preference in Thanksgiving wines runs to reds, simply because of the weather. Cold weather has me seeking a red wine. But I always have a bottle or two of fruity Riesling, Alsatian Pinot Blanc, or Gewürztraminer open for those who prefer white. These are all great turkey wines.

Light Red Wines. Because turkey is such a light meat, I don't want the wine to overpower it. This eliminates Cabernet, Merlot, Malbec and so forth from the running. This is the time of year that I love to serve a delightful Beaujolais, Pinot Noir, or maybe even a lightly oaked light red from Italy, such as Sangiovese or Nebbiolo.

Fruity Red Wines. Thanksgiving dinner is one of the spiciest meals most people will eat during the year; many dishes are loaded with cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Another approach to selecting a wine is to complement these spices with a spicy wine such as a Zinfandel, Shiraz, Syrah, and other spicy fruit-foward wines or wines with soft tannins. I really like a fruity Grenache for its spiciness.

Oh yeah, when in doubt, Pinot Noir.

So what am I pouring at Thanksgiving? Lots and lots of choices of the wines I've discussed above so that everyone has something and hopefully so that people will try something new. And what's in my glass? Do you have to ask?

When in doubt, Pinot Noir.

Turkey Time

Monday November 2, I was fortunate enough to be able to taste nine breeds of heritage turkey at Ayrshire Farm, which supplies many of our proteins here at the restaurant including chicken, guinea, pork, veal, and beef, not to mention outstanding organic produce. Frequent readers of the blog will remember that I have been to two other tastings this year, first chickens, then steers, and the results of the double-blind tastings have been fascinating, showing remarkable differences between the breeds.

This tasting, though it followed the same format as the previous two was just a bit different in that CBS Sunday Morning was filming a piece on Sandy Lerner and that I had the honor of being one of the "celebrity" judges, along with Anya Fernald, of Live Culture and one of the judges on The Next Iron Chef; Lisa Brefere of GigaChef; and Chris Edwards, chef of Patowmack Farm in Loudoun County.

One thing that home cooks might take away from this tasting is a conversation that we judges had while sequestered in a back room tasting our samples—with a TV camera, boom mike, and several still photographers clicking away. And that is that none of us are much in favor of roasting a whole bird. There is such a difference between the white and dark meat that they are best when cooked separately and differently. For myself, I like to take the breasts off, then brine and smoke or roast them. The legs, I want to slowly braise with bacon, wine, and mushrooms.

If you frequent the restaurant, you may notice that we often treat poultry (and by extension, rabbits) this way. You'll frequently see a lightly grilled breast of guinea or lightly grilled loin of rabbit on the same plate with a gratin of the rest of the animal, often braised with red wine, Virginia slab bacon, pearl or cipollini onions, and wild mushrooms.

I'm not suggesting you do this with your Thanksgiving turkey—no doubt all your guests are expecting the traditional whole roasted bird—but if you do get one of the heritage turkeys that we tasted, you might want to reconsider. They spend considerable time running around foraging and as a result, they have really muscular legs that you may find a little tough and chewy simply roasted.

We tasted Black, Bourbon Red, Chocolate, Midget White, Narragansett, Royal Palm, Slate, Standard Bronze, and White Holland turkeys, all raised identically at Ayrshire this year.

I found it interesting that we judges rated the Royal Palm highest (photo above courtesy of Wikipedia), while the rest of the crowd about 70 strong had a marked preference for the Midget White. I had the Midget White third on my card. I really liked the Royal Palm for not only the depth of flavor in the breast meat, but for the really intense dark meat. I don't want to speak for the other judges but I think we were all drawn to that delicious dark meat.

My hat is off to Ayrshire chef Rob Townsend for getting up at the crack of dawn and cooking not nine turkeys but eighteen, nine of which went into a gorgeous display in the dining room.

Tastes Like Chicken...

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you won't be surprised to learn that I spent the better part of yesterday at Ayrshire Farm in Upperville, VA, seeing where a lot of our meat and produce comes from. I was also there to participate in the Chicken Choosin', a blind tasting of 10 heritage breeds of chicken and Ayrshire's White Cornish Rock Cross (the industry standard broiler chicken) thrown in for good measure. Not only was this event planned to focus attention on heritage breeds of chicken, but it will also serve as input to Ayrshire about what breed or breeds to concentrate on in the future.

Each chicken was raised at Ayrshire farm on organic feed with equal access to pasture to an age of 16 weeks, except for the Corn-Rock which reaches market weight in 6-8 weeks. The Corn-Rocks are what they currently raise and I know from prior experience with them that they are excellent birds, superior in flavor and texture to anything else in this area. Each chicken was roasted identically with no seasonings, then moistened with unsalted chicken stock to keep it from drying out in the chafing dishes. Kudos to the kitchen staff: well done.

I've done hundreds of blind tastings of wine in my life and even blind tastings of things so esoteric as salt, but never have I tasted a major protein source blind before. The good news is that there are significant differences in flavor and texture of the various breeds of chicken that call into question the phrase "tastes like chicken."

I'd say that roughly 80-90 of us tasted the numbered chicken samples and ranked them on flavor, texture and appearance on a scale of 1-6, with 6 being the highest score. Because the chicken was cut up, I only ranked my samples with an aggregate score of both the dark meat and the breast meat for flavor and texture, and not appearance. Each of us then indicated which numbers ranked first, second, and third on our scorecards.

For me, one chicken in particular stood out for being excellent in both flavor and texture and two stood out for being at the bottom of the heap. I had three other chickens clustered near the top and the remainder were in the middle. I retasted the highs and the lows just to reconfirm my rankings with new samples.

As the votes were tallied, a clear consensus emerged for chicken number two on our cards. This handsome bird to the right ranked first in first-, second-, and third-place votes. I had this chicken in third place on my card out of 11 birds. The crowd favorite is the Dorking, and old English breed said to have been brought to England by the Romans. This photo courtesy of podchef.

I had to chuckle when I heard the name of this bird announced. I hope that residents of the town of Dorking won't take offense that I my mind flashed on a Gary Larsonesque cartoon of a nerdy rooster sporting eyeglasses and a pocket protector.

Surprising to me was that the Corn-Rock cross was tied for second with the crowd. I had it as the lowest scoring bird on my card, tasting very generically chickeny, which I suppose is why it appealed to so many people. My favorite was the Plymouth Rock, which edged out several other birds on my card by virtue of its excellent texture across both the dark and the light meat.

We tasted the Buckeye, Cornish Rock Cross, Delaware, Dominique, Dorking, Faverolle, New Hampshire, Orpington, Plymouth Rock, Rhode Island, and Sussex.

My thanks to the entire staff at Ayrshire Farm for inviting me and for all their hard work in making this event run smoothly.

To a Chicken

There are some flavors that are so deeply rooted in your soul that you'll never forget them. For me, I cannot forget what chicken tasted like at my grandmother's house where the bird was recently brought in from the chicken house. I still remember that essential chicken goodness now forty years later because it left a visceral imprint on my taste memory. I would recapture that memory but for a brief instant twenty-five years later in a small restaurant in the Beaujolais when eating Coq au Beaujolais made with a Bresse chicken from a nearby town. And since then, I have been searching for that elusive grail.

Every new pastured chicken producer in my area has promised chicken with flavor and I have cooked their birds only to find them underwhelming. Good birds, yes, but flavor approaching my taste memory, no. The birds were the wrong kind, bred for quick market weight and not for flavor. But recently, I got a chicken from another farm in the area. And something about the chicken spoke to me. I can't tell you why, but I just knew by holding the bird in my hands that it was going to be a great chicken. It sounds funny, but so be it.

I have often said to people when they ask me how I decide to fix something that I let the product tell me what to do with it. Holding this chicken, an idea popped into my head about what to do with it, almost as if the chicken were dictating what I should do to it. There is no way that I could have done anything else with this bird other than what came into my mind; this bird was destined to be cooked in this particular way and no other. Call me strange; I don't really care.

Last evening, I put the chicken in a weak brine, mainly to remove any traces of blood. This morning, I clarified a pound of butter and after patting the chicken dry, I bathed it, spooning boiling clarified butter over it for the better part of a half an hour, getting a perfectly tight, golden brown, caramelized skin.

Once golden all over, I put it into a covered pan with a bottle of fruity Pinot Blanc and let it cook ever so slowly for about two hours. We held the chicken warm while we strained the braising liquid, reduced it, and finished it with cream, shallots, thyme, and fresh morels. We pulled the chicken off the bones and served each guest some light meat and some dark along with the tiniest local asparagus cooked separately, morels, and the sauce. Photo above, shown with haricots verts and not asparagus.

The result? Sublime. Chicken, you were worthy of this labor intensive preparation and I salute you. Now where are your kin?

Smothered Quail, et al.

This is the next in the series of recipes from my Low Country Cooking Class last week. Smothered Quail is really just quail that has been browned on all sides and then cooked in a gravy; my family would call this Fried Quail (for whatever reason). This method of cooking is technically a quick braise (though without a lid on the pan) and is my favorite way of cooking rabbit and pork chops.

You might recognize this as the country cousin to an étouffée, from the French verb to smother. A Cajun étouffée is very similar in technique, but the roux is going to be darker and the dish will contain trinity (onions, peppers, and celery) and a lot more seasoning. Once you get comfortable with the technique, try an étouffée.

The method could not be simpler. Season a cup of flour with salt and pepper (sure, add cayenne and dried thyme if you like; you're the cook). Dredge the quail in the flour and then brown on all sides in a large skillet over moderate heat. Be careful not to let the brown bits in the pan burn.

Remove the quail from the pan and add 1/2 cup of the seasoned flour to the pan. You might need to add a little more oil at this point to make a good roux. Once the roux is mixed up well, this would be a good point to add any other flavorings that you might want. For my class, I added a couple of diced Surry sausages. I generally would have added sliced onions too, but for some reason I didn't last Sunday. No matter. Cook the roux until it is light brown, then add as much water as you need to make a nice gravy. Start with a couple of cups and add more as necessary.

Add the quail (rabbit, pork chops, Salisbury steaks, beef paleron steaks, chicken, whatever) to the pan and cook gently until it's tender enough to pierce easily with a fork. When done, season to taste with salt (remember, your roux flour was already seasoned) and pepper. I threw in a good portion of crushed red pepper and a couple teaspoons of fresh thyme too.

I can't eat anything cooked in gravy like this without rice and a big pile of greens.

Guinea Hen

Tonight, local guinea hens begin their run on the menu, until they are exhausted. I have 16 hens from Haskins Family Farm in Middletown, Virginia. Photo courtesy of JoePhoto from flickr.com.

Chefs love guinea hen because they're small enough (about two pounds) to roast and they don't tend to dry out as do pheasants, which is very important for restaurant service. They're also really versatile birds; anything you can do with chicken, you can do with guinea. Customers love guinea hens because they taste more chickeny than chicken. Ask my kids about guinea, if you have any doubt.

Domesticated from birds in the pheasant family that call west Africa home, the average guinea is a good looking black bird with tiny white circular spots all over, making it look silver from a distance.

They're kind of fun to have wandering around the yard—they're hell on bugs—but they have an idiot cackle that can drive you nuts after a while. That cackle makes them pretty reasonable watch animals, though. Nobody surprises you if you have guineas around. But, if you've ever tried to move a flock of them out of the way so that you could move your truck, you'd know they aren't the brightest of creatures.

Here's your daily dose of trivia: a young guinea is called a keet.

Bob and Mary Haskins sell their products including eggs, chickens, guineas, and Berkshire pork at various locations including the farmers market on the Old Town Mall in Winchester on Saturday mornings. You can reach them at info@haskinsfamilyfarm.com.

Duck in Kriek

I've always claimed that there are very few original inventions in cooking and anyone who claims to have invented a dish is probably fooling himself. I know that the vast majority of times that I have a novel idea, I can go out on the internet and find that someone has already had that same idea. Here's a case in point.

A customer sent me an email recently stating that he had a bunch of kriek in his basement, asking if I had ever cooked with it and what he might do with it. I answered that I had used it various ways over the years, mostly in desserts. Kriek-macerated fresh fruit is wonderful and kriek makes a great sabayon. I also answered that right now, I feel like braising duck in it with dried sour cherries, shallots, and thyme.

Let me digress to say that kriek is a Belgian beer spontaneously fermented with naturally occuring yeasts. After the primary fermentation, sour cherries are added, causing a secondary fermentation. The beer is dry, a touch sour from the wheat added to the barley and from the native yeasts, and it picks up color, flavor, and aroma from the cherries.

The dish I was seeing in my mind was kriek-braised Moulard duck legs with grilled Moulard duck breast, bacon-roasted Brussels sprouts and chestnuts, and a sauce of the reduced braising liquid augmented with demiglace. Unfortunately, our sprouts are about three weeks away from being ready. I did find some celery root in the market, but not a vast quantity, so I thought I would purée it and stretch it with potatoes.

After I had featured the dish on the menu this past weekend, I got curious. I've never braised duck in kriek before nor ever encountered it, but I couldn't imagine that I am the first to have ever done it, so just for giggles I typed "duck kriek" into the Google oracle to see just how often it had been done before.

The second hit was from a beer dinner in San Francisco that featured:

Duck Braised in Hansens Kriek
Slowly cooked Duck Legs With Shallots, Thyme, Dried Montmorency Cherries
topped with a Duck Kriek Demi-Glace on a Bed of Celery Root Potato Puree
with Milk Poached White Asparagus

This is identical to what I thought of, less the asparagus.

So to the chef who a few years ago took the trouble to call me to let me know that I had ripped off one of his dishes, I say get over yourself friend. I'm willing to bet that hundreds of people did it before you.

Arroz con Pollo

My kids are at the restaurant for dinner tonight and I, like cooking parents everywhere, sometimes struggle to find dishes with good kid appeal for dinner. But I'm not struggling tonight because I'm making arroz con pollo. Vegetarians aside, is there anyone who doesn't love chicken and rice?

Arroz con pollo is one of those dishes that sometimes causes skirmishes (read "religious wars") for the mere reason that everyone's abuela (grandmother) makes the best version in the world. The truth is that everyone's arroz con pollo is pretty decent, with the exception of a version that one of my Mexican dishwashers made for me. He claimed that arroz con pollo was one of his great dishes; apparently he cannot even warm a taco in a microwave.

I'm a through-and-through gringo with no Latino or Spanish heritage, so it's not possible for my grandmother to have one of those "best in the world" versions of arroz con pollo. This is greatly liberating for me in that I am able to steal bits and pieces of the dish from around the world and not have my version judged by the grandma standard.

For my version tonight, I'm starting by marinating bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs in a classic Cuban mojo of lime juice (sorry, no sour oranges in the house), olive oil, garlic, cilantro, oregano, cumin, black pepper, and here I go deviating again, pimentón.

The choice of rice is critical. Arroz requires a short-grained rice so that it has a risotto- or paella-like texture, so I went into the pantry to get some Arborio rice. The traditional rice for paella is Sollana (aka Calasparra) or Bomba, both available at La Tienda; to reduce items in inventory, we stock only Arborio, which is a good, but not perfect, substitute. In the pantry, however, I got sidetracked by the Carolina Gold rice from Anson Mills, which is also a fantastic rice short-grained rice. Tonight, may your abuela not roll in her grave, I'm using Carolina Gold.

Not to put to fine a point on it, arroz is all about the quality of the rice. When I order arroz in a Mexican restaurant and I get Uncle Ben's, that's a clear signal that they don't care about the quality of their food. But, I can understand that if you've got starving kids and 45 minutes to get dinner on the table, you're going to use whatever you have in your pantry. Just make sure you get some good rice on your next trip to the store.

I also like my arroz more like paella in flavoring, so I am using a bit of chorizo in it, backed up by the pimentón. I also am using fresh tomatoes rather than tomato paste as in many versions of arroz. And, a big pinch of saffron will find its way into the pan.

To start my dish, I made some annatto oil (1/4 cup vegetable oil heated with 2 teaspoons of annatto seeds; seeds removed) in which I will brown the chicken and then cook my sofrito of yellow onion and red Corno di Toro pepper.

Here then is a recipe for approximately what I did. I didn't measure the liquid at all; I have cooked so many rice dishes in my life that I can just eyeball it. Fortunately, rice is pretty forgiving and you can always add more liquid if you need it. Serves 8.

Ed's Confused Arroz con Pollo

Chicken Mojo

8 skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs
juice of three limes, two sour oranges, or one orange and one lime
2 tablespoons minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced cilantro
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon black pepper, coarsely ground

Mix the chicken with all of the mojo ingredients and refrigerate until you are ready to cook it.

Mise en Place

1/4 cup annatto oil
1 yellow onion, diced
1 red pepper, diced
4 ounces hard spanish chorizo, diced
1 large tomato, diced
1 12-ounce bottle lager beer
salt and pepper
large pinch of saffron threads
2 cups short-grained rice (Carolina Gold, Arborio, Bomba)
1 quart water or stock

Preheat your oven to 350F. Heat the annatto oil in a large sautoir or other oven proof pan. Brown the chicken and remove. Add the onion and pepper and cook until the onion starts to wilt, about three minutes. Add the chorizo and tomatoes and cook for another minute. Add the beer, salt, pepper, saffron, and any remaining mojo from the chicken; stir well. Return the chicken to the pan and let cook, turning once, about 4 to 5 minutes per side, then remove again. Add the rice to the pan with about three cups of water or stock. Stir well and let return to the boil. Place the chicken on the rice evenly and in a single layer. Cover the pan and place into the oven for 25 minutes. Remove from the oven and check for doneness and need for more liquid. Cook longer and add more liquid as appropriate.

¡Buen Provecho!

Sell, Menu, Sell!

Let's face it. We restaurateurs are in business to sell food and our primary sales tool is our menu. All of us have had experiences with really great dishes that did not sell. In fact, Food Arts has a regular column called "Hits and Flops" in which chefs and pastry chefs discuss dishes that are wild successes and really great dishes that just wouldn't move.

I buy items in very small quantities and I change my menu daily, replacing the items that sell out with new ones, so I rarely have situations where dishes just don't move.

But I encountered just such a situation this week. A customer requested that we put a chicken dish on the menu for his group of 22 people. We rarely ever have chicken on the menu for the simple reason that it's what most people eat at home, and they are not coming to One Block West to eat what they eat at home. Or at least that's my rationalization for not putting an ingredient that I find extremely boring on the menu.

But, when I do put chicken on the menu (folks, I will not verb a noun and say "when I menu chicken"), say a roasted poussin or a tagine of chicken with olives and preserved lemons, it flies off the menu. A lot of customers perceive chicken as a safe option when faced with a menu that includes bison, wild boar, ostrich, squab, and sashimi. And I think that's what my customer was looking for: something safe for his guests.

Knowing that, I recreated a dish that I had in a private home in Burgundy: a freshly killed chicken stewed in white Burgundy with fresh herbs and vegetables from the garden behind the house, finished with some heavy cream. The grandmother that prepared this dish was justifiably proud of it. It was pure, simple, fresh, and clearly of the moment.

I gussied the dish up a bit for restaurant service. I braised bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs* in Chardonnay with leeks and a bouquet garni, then skinned and defatted the chicken when done. From the stock, I made a thyme-infused cream sauce. I poached tournéed baby carrots and haricots verts separately and roasted cipollini onions. At service, I reheated the chicken in the cream sauce and added the perfectly cooked vegetables at the last second to warm through. All the components were carefully plated in a large bowl, napped with the sauce, and garnished with fresh thyme. In short, it was a gorgeous, elegant, and tasty dish.

*Yes, I said thighs, which have all the flavor in the chicken. Don't get me started on boneless, skinless chicken breasts—the Wonder® Bread of the chicken world. That's a topic for a rant and this post is not a rant.

In honor of the grandmother whose name I have forgotten, I named the dish quite simply enough Poulet Grandmère and it appeared on the menu thus:

Poulet Grandmère
Chicken Stewed in White Wine; Served with Baby Vegetables in an Herb Cream Sauce

The result: we sold none of the 20 portions I prepared. Of the 50-plus entrées ordered that night, zero were chicken. As I mentioned above, we never strike out with chicken. After dinner service, I went back to my desk to ponder this.

I came to two conclusions. First, people were likely put off by the French name of the dish. I'm guessing that they wouldn't venture to pronounce* it or they read only the bold type and didn't understand that poulet is chicken. Second, if they read the description, they may have been put off by "stewed," thinking it too homey a dish for fine dining.

*How do you learn to pronounce things if you don't try? When faced with a menu item I cannot pronounce (Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, etc.), I ask my server. Then one of two things happens. The server says, "I don't have a clue!" and we all have a great laugh. Or, the server and I go back and forth until I get the pronunciation down. Either way, the pronunciation does not stop me from ordering.

Sitting at my desk, I made two changes to the menu for the next night, thus:

Chicken with Baby Vegetables
Chicken Slow-Cooked in White Wine; Served with Baby Vegetables in an Herb Cream Sauce

And the result? Fourteen portions sold. And you thought that all we chefs have to do is worry about cooking!