The irrepressible Ken Hom popped up on Saturday Kitchen this week to show off a dish for Chinese New Year. He made a platter of crispy noodles topped with velveteen chicken in a savoury sauce. Three of us saw it being made and we immediately decided that it was what we were having for Sunday lunch.
My only change was to add some red pepper; it seemed odd that it would be lacking a vegetable element (ignoring the spring onions). With that, it was a very satisfying dinner and went down extremely well. Beautifully soft chicken, fresh fruity peppers, a tangy and glutinous coating sauce, but the real revelation were the crispy noodles. After a quick parboiling I laid them flat in the frying pan and allowed them to crisp. A risky toss later and the other side was also browned. This gave a delicious contrast of crispy and chewy, and hoovered up the sauce perfectly.
The only slight downer was Ken served his perfect circle of noodles on one platter, allowing people to share. That wasn’t going to work for me so I had to carve them up in a hacking fashion! Tasted just as good though.
Gung hee fatt choi!
Chicken on crispy noodles:
300g chicken breast diced very small
1 egg white
2 teaspoons cornflour
Pinch of salt
½ teaspoon white pepper
1 red pepper, diced
4 egg noodle nests
2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
1½ tablespoons oyster sauce
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
300ml chicken stock
1 tablespoon cornflour, mixed with 1½ tablespoon water
Spring onions, chopped
Mix the egg white, cornflour, salt and pepper and toss in the chicken breast, coating thoroughly.
Boil the noodles briefly, drain and add to a hot pan spreading them out evenly. After 5 minutes a crust should have formed; turn the noodles over.
While the noodles cook, mix the stock, vinegar, and oyster sauce together.
After another 5 minutes put the noodles on kitchen paper to drain off the excess oil.
Over a high heat in a little oil fry the chicken and peppers, stirring quickly, until the chicken is white on all sides. Remove from the pan and leave to one side.
Add the wet ingredients and bubble for a minute, add the cornflour and allow to thicken. Put the chicken and peppers back in the pan with the spring onion and stir fry to allow the sauce to coat the meat and veg. After a minute or two turn out on to the noodles and serve.
After favourable experiences with their wonderful lamb, I thought I was on to a winner with a jar of Balti paste provided by Abel & Cole. It’s not by them but by a company called Geo Organics. You mix it with raw meat (chicken in this case) then add tinned tomatoes. I served it with rice and spicy cabbage.
It was disappointing – very little flavour to speak of, just a harsh burning sensation masking any real spices or aromas. It only goes to cement my notion that curry pastes really can’t be done in a jar – they are best prepared at home, with your own masala, with your own tempering. It’s a shame as I really wanted to like it; Geo Organics’ credentials are superb and you have to applaud the type of products they are making and the way they approach it. Unfortunately the flavour was just not there in this case.
Every couple of months I get the urge to make another curry, and I’ve made plenty in the last year. It was a Saturday dish, so I had to time to put a little effort in. After a little research I settled on Jamie Oliver’s chicken tikka masala from Jamie’s Dinners. I still had some garam masala left over from a Heston-inspired blend some months ago so that was going to be my main spice base. Also with recent experiments in brining being met with a great deal of success I had to stick some brining in as the first stage. You could skip this bit if you wanted to, but I love the moistness and depth of flavour this imparts.
I wanted a vegetable side-dish and love the way cauliflower absorbs curry flavours. The key for me is to almost overcook it – a soft, squishy floret bursting with spice is the way to go here.
Plain rice is always sniffed at in my house so I have to be creative with it. I remembered a delicious rice dish by the cuddly Nigel Slater, from my most favourite of his books Appetite. I’ve eaten it before just on it’s own, but gently pared down it makes a tasty – yet interesting – bowl of rice.
The curry itself was time-consuming (aren’t they all?) but thankfully very, very tasty. In fact about the most ‘authentic’ (yes, of course I mean authentic to that you find in a takeaway) tikka masala recipe I’ve eaten. Creamy, nutty and boasting spice from within. The cauliflower was a tasty foil for the curry, with aromatic rice to back it up. (On a side note, both Jamie’s and Nigel’s recipe called for at least 1 chilli in each – we’re not so crazy about super-hot things in our house, so I’ve omitted them to let the spices speak for themselves. By all means chuck some in if they’re your thing).
A dead tasty nottakeaway.
Chicken tikka masala (serves 3):
For the brine:
1 litre water
2 tablespoons sea salt
5 tablespoons honey
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 cardamom pods, cracked
3 cloves
2 chicken breasts, diced
For the tikka marinade:
6 cloves garlic, grated
3 inches fresh ginger, grated
1 tablespoon mustard seeds
1 tablespoon paprika
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons ground coriander
2 tablespoons garam masala
200g natural yoghurt
For the masala sauce:
2 onions, sliced
2 tablespoons garam masala
2 tablespoons tomato puree
2 tablespoons ground almonds
120ml double cream
Handful parsley, chopped
Mix the brine ingredients together and soak the chicken in the water for at least 2 hours, anywhere up to 8 hours.
Drain and rinse the chicken well. Discard the liquid.
Heat the mustard seeds in a splash of oil until they start to pop (about 2 minutes). Remove the seeds from the pan and stir into the other ingredients. Coat the chicken with the yoghurt mix and leave to marinate for half an hour.
In the same pan the mustard seeds were warmed in, add some butter and fry the onions gently with the garam masala. Leave to sweat and soften for 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, grill the chicken pieces on both sides until cooked through.
Back at the onions, ad the tomato puree, almonds, 1 litre water and a good sprinkle of salt. Allow to bubble and reduce until thick.
Add the cream and check the seasoning. Add the chicken into the sauce and stir well to coat the meat and let the flavours mingle.
Stir in the parsley and serve.
Gobi masala:
1 head of cauliflower, cut into small florets to cook evenly
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon garam masala
200ml vegetable stock
Heat the butter in a small saucepan until foaming. Add the spice and cook for a minute.
Add the florets and toss well to coat in the spice butter. Cook for another minute.
Add the stock and boil fairly fast until the cauliflower is knife-tender.
Turn off the heat and put a lid on it for about ten minutes. The cauliflower will soak up some of the excess fluid.
Aromatic rice:
1 onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, peeled and bashed
1 cinnamon stick
3 cloves
4 cardamom pods
1 cupful rice per person
Fry the onion gently until softened, then add the garlic.
Add the spices and stir, allowing them to warm.
Add the rice and a generous sprinkle of salt, stir will to coat the rice in the spiced oil. Top up the pan with three times the amount of water to rice. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer.
Cover the pan and allow to simmer for ten minutes – do not lift the lid.
Turn off the heat and leave for a further ten minutes, leaving the lid on.
Stir through with a fork and grind over plenty of black pepper. If you have any left over from the curry, throw in some parsley too.
For my most recent birthday, two close friends bought me volume 1 of Heston Blumenthal’s In Search of Perfection. They were coming round for dinner so I thought it totally appropriate to serve up dinner from these pages. Heston is a genuine influence on me, a real visionary. Everyone rags on the “bacon and egg ice cream” etc but the point of his cooking is to examine what it is we enjoy when we go through the process of eating. What sparks the endorphins, is it taste, texture, smell, atmosphere…? The answer is probably all of these, and this particular book (based on the BBC series) is trying to find the right balance of all these elements to make the ‘perfect’ example of it’s type.
I’m very happy with the way I make roast chicken, so giving myself over to this recipe was task enough. However it’s Hesto, the master, so I’m completely up for it. As you might expect, perfection doesn’t come that swift – the key is in several stages, though none of them are terribly taxing. Essentially there are four stages: brining, drying out, slow roasting, pan-browning.
I fell at the first hurdle; I didn’t get poulet au bresse, the queen of chicken. But I did get a fine free range example from a new butcher I found in Chingford. The first part of preparation was brining: I’ve recently had some real successes with brining chicken so I knew this phase was going to produce succulent, tender meat. As is often the case with Heston dishes there’s some maths to get us going: it’s an 8% brine solution. This involves weighing the pot with the chicken, covering it with water and then weighing it again to work out how much water there is. You can then work out 8% table salt from this measurement. The chicken was then brined for six hours, and then soaked in clean water for a further hour to remove the excess salty flavour.
Here’s how the chicken looked after the brining. At this point the bird was dunked in boiling water for thirty seconds before the cooking was halted in ice water. This stage was then repeated – this part is crucial as it kills off bacteria that won’t get eliminated by the slow ‘n’ low cooking time later on. The chicken is then left to dry overnight in the fridge, with a rather attractive clean dishcloth covering it.
The next day was cooking time. The plan is to cook it long and slow on a low heat. Heston says that a raw chicken is 80% water, and roasting is a long battle to retain as much of that as possible. The brining is the first part of that, affecting the meat in such a way as to make it retain moisture. The cooking is unusual: a temp of 70°C for around 4 – 6 hours until the internal temperature of the bird is 60°C. (The oven is supposed to be at 60°C too, but my oven can’t go that low – I could probably force it by cracking the door open but it’s just too random. It’ll have to do.) I have to say, it was utterly terrifying cooking it that low and peering at it through the glass door. It sat there, not leaking any juice, not noticeably colouring. After years of roasting birds in the traditional way of “high heat, turn it down when it’s in” cooking, this just felt wrong. Hour after hour I inserted the probe, the temperature slowly creeping up the gauge.
Eventually it reached an internal temp of about 62°C, prodding the chicken all over to ensure an good average. This took about 6 and a half hours. It looked like the picture, barely coloured, a sort of pale gold. However the book does warn that this might be the case. I then left it to rest for an hour or so while I got on with the accompanying broccoli, carrots and roast potatoes. Something else I also did in this interval was to prepare a luscious chicken butter: I’d removed the wing tips and fried them in butter, then discarded the chicken bits. This butter was going to be used at the last minute.
After resting, the chicken is technically ready but the skin is anaemic and not enticing. So there’s probably the most difficult stage here: frying an entire chicken in a pan with brittle skin. I heated my biggest pan as high as it would go, added a little oil and then began frying the chicken with my monstrous barbeque implements, gently turning the bird over and over until it had finally taken on that bronzed appearance that sets the saliva going. Then as a final touch, I used a small knife to make tiny holes and inserting a baster to inject chickeny buttery juice into the flesh of the bird, infusing it with richness and savoury goodness.
With wild, anticipatory glee I carried the chicken on my stoutest chopping board to the table and carved to order. Was it worth it? Should I have slaved all these hours for any gain at all?
YES.
Everyone agreed, many times over, that it was the best chicken we’d ever had. Unfortunately my pictures of the served meat didn’t come out. The carving was practically non-existent, no hacking or sawing here. The meat still very firm from having lost none of it’s moisture. And the flavour… it was richer and more intense, and the chicken-ness filling the mouth. It was a superb bird indeed. My friends were still texting me a day later to compliment the chicken. So I think it was worth it. Note I didn’t season the chicken at any point other than to add a little pepper before roasting. That said, some of the meat near the bone was quite ruby-pink and a little disconcerting; I’m not entirely sure why. I’d like to try a variation though next time: keep the brining, keep the last-minute basting but cooking with regular semi-fast roasting. That might well be a perfect combination of techniques.
One puzzling omission though: this is a ‘perfect’ recipe yet there’s no mention of gravy. Yes the meat is totally moist but the gravy is a wonderful unifier of the roast dinner, it brings everything together. You certainly couldn’t make it with juices from the pan; there was a teaspoonful in the bottom of the tray. I couldn’t fathom a roast chicken without some so I roasted off some root veg and added stock to have on the side.
Remove the wingtips from the bird and reserve for later.
Soak the chicken in an 8% brine solution for 6 hours.
Rinse the chicken thoroughly, then soak in clean water for an hour, changing the water every 15 minutes.
Dunk the chicken in boiling water for 30 seconds, then place into iced water. Repeat this step once more.
Leave the chicken overnight in the fridge on a wire cooling rack over a baking tray, covered with a clean dishcloth.
Heat the oven to 60°C, and cook the chicken for 4 – 6 hours until the internal temperature is 60°C throughout.
Leave the chicken to rest for an hour. Meanwhile fry the wingtips in the butter until the butter turns brown. Strain off and reserve – you can discard the chicken bits.
Heat a pan as hot as you can and add a little oil. Fry the chicken on all sides until evenly browned.
Using a needle baster inject the bird with the chicken butter all over – be as generous as possible.
