My name is Rebecca Peizer with The Culinary Institute of America at Greystone.
And today I'm going to show you how to make this fabulous Provencal Roasted Chicken with Grapes.
We have here some chicken thighs with the bone-in, and the skin on. This will help us create a really
nice moist juicy chicken with a little bit of texture from that skin.
The rub that I'm going to put on the chicken includes fennel seed, bay leaf, black pepper, and juniper berries.
And these have all been ground down to a fine powder in a coffee grinder.
Or you could do that also in a mortar and pestle.
And I've got some salt.
While I have a cast-iron pan heating up over here, I'm going to season my chicken.
So, take a generous amount of your seasoning mixture,
and season both sides.
It's important that the chicken be *dry* while you're doing this,
so that it doesn't stick to the pan, and your spices will stick to the chicken.
I've got a little bit of olive oil.
I'm going to put the olive oil in the pan and let that heat up just a bit.
When you start to see you wisps of smoke, you're good to go.
So, skin side down...
[sizzling sounds]
Don't crowd the pan too much, otherwise rather than a crispy skin,
you will get a steamed chicken...
And I'm going to allow this to cook for about five to eight minutes undisturbed,
allowing that skin to render down....Very, very crispy.
So, now that our chicken is really nice and crispy — it's been about five to six minutes now —
I'm gonna take them out of the pan and turn them over skin-side up.
And I want to drain away any excess fat that might be in the pan,
so that I don't end up with a very greasy sauce.
A little bit of fat left behind will help us to start roasting our garlic and our shallots.
I have here some peeled shallots. I've left a little bit of the root intact.
Throw those in the pan.
And some whole peeled garlic cloves that have been trimmed.
So, we're gonna toss these around in here. Start to get a little bit of color....
Coat them very well with some of that rendered chicken fat and olive oil and seasoning.
[sizzling sounds]
To this I'm going to add some white wine,
some Picholine olives — these are from the South of France,
and I have some lovely red grape clusters here.
[loud sizzling sounds]
While that's heating up, we're gonna add our rosemary to the dish.
In order to give a beautiful southern French style look to this dish,
as well as scent this chicken with the rosemary.... I've created some skewers out of the rosemary branches,
by removing some of the leaves from the bottom.
I'm going to take these skewers and poke them through the chicken
to create a little bit of a skewered chicken there,
and put that in the pan right on top.
Lastly we're going to add our grape clusters.
I've cut the large grape cluster into smaller little uniform clusters,
and we're going to add another layer of flavor, a depth of texture, to this dish...
....by roasting the grapes with the olives, with the chicken, with the herbs....
And in the amount of time that it takes these chicken thighs to cook — which will be about 30 minutes,
these grapes will roast just enough, start to blister...
Lend a little bit of their sweetness to the sauce,
as well as take on a whole new texture and flavor.
See how beautiful that looks.
We're going to put this into the oven at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes.
And when that comes out of the oven, we have beautifully roasted chicken
with herbs, olives, these wonderful little red grape clusters —which have just started to blister a little bit....
And a wonderful sauce that's been made from all of the drippings of all of those wonderful things.
So, let's put this to the plate.
Provencal roasted chicken with roasted grapes, white wine, and garlic.