Quick hunter-style chicken cacciatore.
The elements of this dish are earthy wild mushroom,
these are dried porcinis,
or you can get mixed dried mushrooms,
and we're going to reconstitute them.
You know, hunters, they're out in the woods all day.
So we're using dark meat chicken, right?
That a hunter would prefer,
as to white meat.
We're going boneless, skinless, so it's quick cooking.
I put the seasoned side down in the pan first.
This first side I cook for about four minutes.
When I flip the chicken,
I will cook it about a minute less.
Meanwhile, in another pan,
we're moving the recipe forward
by reconstituting these mushrooms.
About a cup to a cup and a half of liquid.
So water, stock, I'm using chicken bone broth
because we're cooking with chicken,
and we get our porcini or mixed wild mushrooms
down in there so it can all reconstitute,
plump back up and come back to life right?
When the chicken comes out,
we're going to add our 'mirepoix'
from our 'mise en place' or 'all things in place'
and our 'mirepoix' is your standard carrots, celery, onion.
So I have a couple of carrots here,
I'm just going to use one,
for the natural sugar in the sauce.
That'll give us some sweetness.
And I'm just using my little handheld grater here.
So our carrots, celery, onion, and rosemary,
I salted a little,
and now we let that sweat a couple of minutes
and now we're adding the garlic.
(sizzling)
(tongs bang on pan)
And then next we're going to add a little tomato paste.
Stir that to wake it up.
Then we're going to add in,
about a cup of our Italian red wine,
this is 'rosso di montalcino'.
(pan sizzles)
It's actually the end of that bottle.
And a little chili flake or a fresh chili, minced.
Next I want to layer in our reconstituted porcini.
Now you can pull these out,
and drain them and finely chop them
and when I serve them with pasta, I do.
When I'm serving it this way,
and we're going to use a fork and a knife
to eat the chicken,
and we're not serving it with pasta,
I literally just add them to the pan.
These are already sliced.
Now here's where you need to be just a little bit careful.
When you add the stock,
reserve the last few spoonfuls.
All dried mushrooms can be a little gritty
and the grit will have settled to the bottom of the pan.
So we want to reserve that,
and discard it so that we don't serve grit with our sauce.
Then we add in our crushed tomato or fire roasted tomato,
or diced tomato, any sort of tomato product.
And then we slide the chicken back in.
Delightful!
And now we'll drop this down
and just let it simmer together for a couple of minutes
and we'll serve it right from the pan
with that charred bread.
I don't even have a broiler, I got a pretty nice char.
So guys, this is ciabatta by the way.
And it literally is just charred bread,
rubbed generously with garlic,
drizzled with good, fruity, buttery olive oil.
So good, fancy olive oil.
Put him back over here.
And then a little flaky sea salt.
We're going to serve our cacciatore
right from the pan.
And I think kind of the sexiest part of this,
(bread crunches)
is to take chunks of this bread
and literally, hop it down
into the sauce and juice,
give it a little spin,
so people get the idea.
To me, that like, that's dessert.
(wind chimes play)