Chicken two ways with seared foie gras and tarragon sauce

I made this recipe from memory the other day when visiting Caroline in Cahuzac. Essentially, I was looking for something to do with fresh foie gras that was not too overpoweringly fatty. I say I made the recipe from memory although I have no recollection of where the original recipe came from. In any case it was a resounding success according to the people at the table who regularly tell me I’m a much better cook than I really am just so that I keep on cooking.

This recipe requires braising the legs, roasting the breasts and making stock out of the rest of the chicken. It is important to start the stock an hour or two ahead of the rest as it will be needed in the cooking of both the legs and the breasts.

Ingredients:

1. Two smallish young free range chickens, ideally poussin, cut up so that you have, per chicken 4 legs pieces, 1 whole breast, 4 wings pieces and two back pieces;
2. 7 medium turnips, cleaned, trimmed and 6 cut in half, 1 cut into ½ cm thick medallions;
3. 3 red onions sliced in ½ cm thick slices;
4. 2 whole leeks cut into cm thick chunks;
5. A large bunch of tarragon cut finely;
6. 1 large quartered onion;
7. 1 large carrot;
8. 50 gr softened butter;
9. 1 bottle full bodied white wine.
10. 3 large sprigs rosemary;
11. 1 bunch thyme;
12. 1 bunch sage leaves;
13. 1 medium fresh lobe of foie gras, cleaned up (devein it and remove any other nasty bits), cut into 1.5 cm thick slices and generously seasoned with sea salt and black pepper. Keep the foie gras in the fridge until just before searing.

Preparations:

1. Preheat oven to 180 C (200 if no convection);
2. Make the broth by combining the onion, carrot, chicken wings and chicken backs in a large stock pot, season lightly with salt and pepper, cover with water (should need about a litre and a half) let simmer briskly for at least 1.5 hours (the broth will be better the longer you let it simmer);
3. To braise the legs start by softening the red onion in a heavy bottomed pan under medium heat. When the onion has turned slightly translucent add the leeks and turnip slices and continue frying until the onion in completely translucent;
4. Cover the bottom of a medium oven proof dish with the onion mixture and add the rosemary, thyme and sage and top with the chicken legs (including the top bit of the wing if you like) sprinkle with salt and pepper. Pour the entire bottle of white wine over the chicken and cover with aluminium foil.
5. Cook chicken legs in the oven for 1 hour. After the first hour take out the chicken and add the halved turnips to the dish. Add chicken stock to the dish until the legs are slightly covered with liquid put back in the oven for another hour;
6. When the 2^nd hour is up drain the liquid of the chicken legs into a sauce pot. You should have about 500 ml of milky brown liquid that needs to be reduced by half (obviously if there is a lot less liquid less reduction is needed). When done reducing the sauce add the tarragon and let simmer for about 10 min;
7. Remove the meat and skin from the chicken legs and chop finely;
8. Put the chicken breasts in a medium oven dish, cover with softened butter and season to taste. Squeeze the juice from one lemon over the chicken and cover the base of the dish with the stock. There should be about a cm thick layer of liquid on the bottom of the dish. Cover with foil so that there is a good 5 cm cover between the chicken breast and the foil. Put into the oven with the chicken legs for the last 45 min of cooking;
9. When done slice the meat of the breast so that you get four slices per breast;
10. On a very hot, preferably non stick, pan (ideally smoking hot) sear the slices of foie gras for about 30 - 40 seconds per side. NOTE cold foie gras and very hot pan are key here;
11. To assemble but the leg meat into a circular form and press down on it to form small cake and wet generously with very hot sauce. Top with a slice of breast meat and a slice of foie gras. Serve with two turnip halves on the side.
    
    Skip the FG and serve with fondant potatoes and this dish is still fab.

Foie Gras Bonbon

In July 2007 while vacationing in Shanghai I vent to the restaurant Jade on 36 at the Shangri-La Hotel. At the 36^th floor of the Shangri-La hotel to be precise. This is where I had a rather magnificent foie gras dish that I wrote about here.

The foie gras bonbon is my attempt at making this dish. I should say the culmination of my attempts at making this dish as there where a number of very unsuccessful tries before I settled on a method that was satisfactory. The qualification “satisfactory” is important as I never managed to get the dish exactly like what I had in Shanghai.

The basic principle here is sweet, salty and tart in three layers. This is not dissimilar from the classic French Chocolate cake Opera and the name at Jade at 36 was: Passion-Choco Foie Gras Opera. The cake is a layered cake with dark chocolate (tart), chocolate ganace (sweet), coffee foam (tart) and almond pastry in quantities that form an extraordinary coming together of taste.

To achieve this with foie gras Jade has added passion fruit jam and cocoa powder. They somehow managed to make a square cake out of the foie gras. This cake rested on a layer of passion fruit gel and was topped with a thin layer of cocoa powder. This has caused me no end of trouble as foie gras is not exactly the most malleable of ingredients to handle. The taste is quite flexible and goes with many things but the material itself is not.

After multiple times of failing to reproduce either a satisfactory passion fruit gel or a to sculpt the foie gras I settled on the following: a shot glass filled with a bottom layer of berry jam, a tablespoon’s worth of foie gras all topped with 85% dark chocolate. This is not as good as what I remember from Jade but very good nonetheless.

To make the jam:

1. 200 grams mixed blue and blackberries;
2. 125 grams sugar;
3. 100 ml good quality quite strong green tea;
4. 1 leaf gelatine.

Heat berries and sugar together in a solid pot when the berries have completely fallen apart add the tea. Boil off all of the liquid (when the starts look thick is when the jam is ready. Pour through a sieve, let cool until you can add the gelatine and pour into the shot glasses. You need about 5 ml in the bottom of the shot glass. Leave in the fridge until the jam has set about two hours.

To get the foie gras into the shot glasses cut out round sections with an apple corer and put on top of the jam. Obviously, this assumes that you like me have shot glasses of a diameter that is similar to that of an apple corer. If not find some other method of cutting cylindrical sections of foie gras with a wider diameter.

Melt the 85% chocolate pour on top of the foie gras and serve.

Reindeer steak with brandy flambéed foie gras, wild mushroom sauce, beetroots in balsamic vinegar and candied potatoes

We had two types of reindeer for New Years Eve, a large steak from the thigh and a couple of smaller fillets. We dry marinated all of the meat overnight in salt and a pepper mix and added red vine to the marinate a couple of hours before serving the meat. The reason for not adding the vine earlier is to prevent it from cooking the meat to much. The small steaks we simply fried, 1.5 – 2 minutes each site, on a very hot pan but the large steaks are more complex. You really need a meat thermometer as it is very important that the core temperature of the reindeer not exceed 60 degrees Celsius. What we did was to brown the meat on a pan and then put it in a preheated convection oven at around 200 Centigrade. You then take out the meat when core temperatures reach 60 degrees.

I much prefer the small fillets to the large piece of meat although both where excellent. The thing about reindeer is that it is basically equivalent to very lean and strong tasting beef and can easily be eaten rare but that extremely hard to accomplish with the big piece.

The foie gras was fresh and I’ve never been any good at pan frying fresh goose liver. Basically, what usually happens is that by the time I have browned the foie gras most of the fat has melted away. This is a serious problem when dealing with something that is mostly fat. I also find that most restaurants have the same problem and that even if they manage to brown the outside the center of the liver is totally uncooked and not terribly appealing.

My latest attempt at teaching myself (one day I’ll ask a master chef!) to cook foie gras I decided to use a cooking method that I’ve never tried before; namely flambéing. The idea here was to heat the liver through at a relatively low temperature to avoid melting and then to get a nice caramelisation going on the outside very quickly. To do this you must first cut the liver into slice no more than 2.5 cm thick and put them on a pan at low flame. When it is time to turn over the liver heat 30 ml of brandy in a separate pan and ignite it before pouring the burning liquid over the liver (the alcohol burns extremly hot so it cooks the outside o the liver quite quickly). Flambé the liver until the alcohol has burned off. Save the alcohol for the sauce. You do all of this after the meat is out of the oven and is settling the idea being that you should serve the reindeer immediately after the foie gras is ready. Basically, cold fried foie gras is disgusting.

Now assuming you have prepared the sauce, beetroot and potatoes you assemble the dish on plates and serve!