Chez Pim

Roast Chicken, Christian Delouvrier's way

2009-11-11T15:04:58-08:00

Recipes come to us in odd little ways. I remember learning how to make truffle omelettes from a gigling, nearly toothless old lady in Southwest France. Of course I took her seriously, she happened to be Marthe Delon, the famous truffle huntress who has been training a truffle-hunting pig a year for over 50 years. She calls them all Kiki - couldn't be bothered to remember a new name each year, she said.

This roast chicken recipe came to me from not so exotic a location but no less interesting a source. The scene was the dining room at Manresa, the participants were Laurent Manrique, our dear friend and the famous chef of what I like to call the-dearly-departed-Aqua, his much-fairer-and-better-half Michelle, and yours truly. We had just been served a deceptively simple truffle omelette. Yes they certainly do omelettes at Manresa, hardly a greasy-countertop-diner-variety made from Nearly Eggless Goo^TM, but one comprised of Porcini puree, freshest farm eggs, and housemade salted butter, oh, yes, and a generous showering of white truffle at the table. It's the kind of dish that made us stopped in our tracks. "Elle m'a mise sur le cul", Laurent said of the dish, a French expression meaning something to the tune of being so gouud it knock' ya on yur ass, hon. That got us talking about deceptively simple dishes that shocked us with their greatness. That's when Laurent brought up this roast chicken recipe he learned from Christian Delouvrier.

You know who Christian Delouvrier is, don't you? He is something of a legend, an old-school chefs' chef kind of character. As far as I'm concerned -and I'd say many will agree- the period when Delouvrier was the chef at the restaurant Alain Ducasse in NYC was the apex of that restaurant - perhaps even any of Ducasse's restaurants post Ducasse himself. That food certainly knocked me on my ass, I totally admit to you.

So when Laurent started telling me about this recipe I sat up straight to pay attention - well, as straight as I could possibly be after many glasses of Chablis -Dauvissat- and Bordeaux -ahem, '66 Madeliene, ahem. This is what he said. (Reading the next paragraph in his cute French accent will help, enormously.)

You take a chicken and you put in a lot of salt, a lot, on the inside, *inside*, and put a lot of thyme and a lot of garlic. Then you rub it with butter all over, *a lot* of butter. Unsalted butter, no salt on the outside at all. Then you bake it at 350F, yes, that low, for 40 minutes. Then you take it out and let it rest 15 minutes. During that time, you make a reduction of same amount of water and soy sauce, then you do like a beurre fondu (of course butter ee eez French!). Reduce it to the consistency of a good jus. Then when the chicken is done resting you brush it all over with mix. Then you put back the chicken, 15 minutes more at 400F. Then remove the chicken and let it rest for 10 minutes. Then you cut up the chicken to serve.

It sounded so simple, and yet unlike any roast chicken recipe I've ever tried. A glace made of soy sauce, water, and butter sounded delightful and odd in about equal measures. I was duly intrigued, and promised myself to try it one day soon. The day turned out to be yesterday. At our house, Tuesday nights are our Sunday nights-since David's days off are Mondays at Tuesdays. We often have a nice dinner with friends, many of whom are in the restaurant business and so have similar schedule. We often have a simple roast chicken (using the recipe I wrote about in my book), so I thought I'd try this new recipe and see what everyone thought about it.

I wasn't so sure if I actually remembered everything, so I called Laurent and quizzed him a bit more. That revealed a few more crucial details about the recipe. The resting periods are very important as the chicken cooks at such a low temperature for a long time. He also recommended using *a lot* of salt, far more than the usual amount. The inside of the chicken would be so salty as to render the carcass unusable - can't keep it for stock or anything. Laurent also mentioned that the thighs might be slightly undercooked, but if that happened I shouldn't panic, as putting them back in the oven for 5-10 minutes more should do the trick. So, armed with these careful instructions, I set to work.

I got one gorgeous chicken, about 4.5lbs of plump, air-processed chicken. Organic, of course. Did you really need to ask? My chicken came trussed already, so I didn't need to do it, but you might. I put an overly generous amount of salt inside the cavity. A lot. I must have used two big handfuls of salt and many, many turns of the peppermill. I stuffed it with two heads of garlic cut in half crosswise, and a big handful of thyme. (When you tell a Thai girl to use a lot of garlic you'd better not be kidding!)

Then I rubbed that baby all over with soft butter. When a Frenchman tells you to use a lot, *a lot*, of butter you take him seriously. I think I used about 4oz of butter, almost a full stick. (Frankly that's probably a bit over board. I'll use a little less next time.)

I preheated the oven to 350F, actually, and put the chicken in. Just about half way through the 40 minute period, I started working on the glace. I mixed 1/3 cup each of water and soy sauce in a small saucepan and set it on a medium fire. I let it reduce by about half, the whisk in the butter, about 5 Tablespoon or 75g. I let it simmered for a bit longer to thicken even more, and the result looked about like this.

After 40 minutes (basting once or twice with the melted butter at the bottom of the pan) I took the chicken out, and turned the oven back up to 400F. This is what my chicken looked like before I covered it (loosely) with foil and let it rest, undisturbed, for 15 minutes.

The I brushed it all over with the glace. Now this chicken is ready to get back into the oven.

The chicken hung out in the hot oven for 15 more minutes. I turned the pan once during that time to make sure the chicken was cooked evenly. This time I didn't baste it at all. At the end of the 15 minutes mark, out came the chicken from the oven.

It rested for the full 10 minutes, then we cut it up for serving. Sure enough, the thighs were just this side of done, so they went back to the oven for five more minutes, that's all. As you can see from the picture, the chicken was plump and juicy still. The skin wasn't crisp, but certainly made up for that shortcoming with the gooey, salty, deliciously sweet flavor from the glace. It was so good we kept taking bites before the plate went out to the table.

Was it worth it, this recipe? You bet. My respect for Christian Delouvrier (and Laurent too for that matter) went up another notch. A little caveat about this though, I think this recipe works best in a convection oven, as the thighs would cook better and more evenly. Also, if for you a roast chicken is all about the crisp skin, this might not be for you. But if you're in it for the juicy, flavorful meat, go for it. You won't be disappointed by this unique recipe.

So, how do you roast your chicken? Any special secrets you wouldn't mind sharing?

The best fig tart, ever (a recipe from The Foodie Handbook)

2009-11-03T09:27:38-08:00

I could also call it the easiest fig tart, ever. Really. It has an astonishingly small list of ingredients: a pie crust*, some luscious figs, with a hidden layer of frangipane, which, despite the fancy-sounding French name, is simply a concoction of toasted almonds, sugar, butter, and egg that you can make easily in a food processor.

The key to the magic here is the frangipane. It's one of those things that sound far more difficult and fancy than they really are. My frangipane recipe came from the one in Michel Bras fantastic Notebooks of Michel Bras: Desserts. It's basically equal quantity (by weight) of almond meal, butter, and sugar, with one egg to bind it all together. That's a truly fantastic recipe, and one so versatile I find a use for it in practically all my fruit tarts, from the summery stone fruits to the fall harvest of pears and apples. Right about now, with melting soft and tantalizingly sweet figs make an appearance all over the place, you can make a fig tart with a base of this frangipane and it will turn even the most ardent fig hater into a lover.

The slight problem I found with the original Bras recipe is the almond flour. If you bake all the time and have access to great almond flour from a professional pastry source, then it'll work just fine. But the rest of us, with access mainly to what's available at the supermarket, finding good (and fresh) enough almond flour to use in this recipe will be challenging. So, I adapted the recipe to use whole almonds which are readily available and generally far fresher than any almond flour you can buy.

Frangipane

75g whole almonds (about 1/2 cup)

75g sugar, you can use half granulated sugar and half confectioner's sugar, or just all granulated sugar (about 1/8 cup granulated plus 1/4 cup confectioner's, or just 1/3 cup granulated)

75g butter at room temperature

1 large egg

Preheat the oven to 350F (180C). Spread the almonds evenly on a baking sheet and place them in the oven. Roast them for about 10 minutes, or until slightly toasted and fragrant. Transfer to a plate and let cool to room temperature.

Put the cooled almonds and the sugar into a food processor and process until fine. Add the butter and the egg and pulse until well-combined. If you don't want to use it right away, divide the frangipane into four equal parts, wrap each tightly in plastic. They will keep in the fridge for a couple of days, and up to a month in the freezer.

To make a 9" fig tart

1 9" pastry dough

about 10 large figs or about 15 small ones

1/4 the recipe of frangipane above

Preheat the oven to 400F (200C). Roll out your pastry dough to about 10-inch diameter - more or less won't harm anything. Spread about 1/4 of the quantity of frangipane on the dough, leaving about 1 inch parameter around the outer edge of the dough. Quarter the figs (only halve if small) and arrange them -pointy end up will be prettier- in concentric circles to cover the frangipane. Fold the edges in, pinching a little to make sure they stick. If you want, you can brush the dough with eggwash and give it a good shower of sugar. Bake for about 45-50 minutes, or until the pastry edges are golden brown.

Serve while still warm, and, if you want to be truly indulgent, with a scoop of my Brown Butter Ice Cream.

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*If you're afraid of pie crust, you can buy one pre-made, just make sure it's an all-butter crust. If you have a favorite recipe, just use it. If you haven't got one yet, I highly recommend the crust recipe from page 121 of the book. The technique might sound odd to you, but you'll only need to try it once before it becomes your basic dough recipe as well, I promise.

How to make a crispy fruit crumble

2009-09-24T10:05:08-07:00

I don't know about you, but I think all this talk about baking being a-precise-science-and-all-that is scaring a lot of people away from baking. I mean, I'm sure baking a ten-layer wedding cake or five hundred tarts may well be precise science. But baking just a pie or a few cookies, that's hardly more so than making a simple bowl of soup.

So, if you're one of those people, I have just a recipe for you to try. Or even if you're not, try it anyway, it's so simple and so good, you'll thank me for it later. (Hold it with the proposals though boys, I am otherwise occupied.)

This is going to be the easiest dessert you’ll ever make. Really it will. It’s basically comprised of two parts, an unusually crisp crumble topping, which comes together in minutes, and a fruit filling, which can be just about any fruit in abundance at the moment. At my market, stone fruits are just about done. So I'm sending them off with the last hurrah with the French prune plums - quetsches as they're called over there.

The crumble topping is quite a bit crispier than your usual crumble, and also quite a bit crumblier than your average crisp. I'm calling it a "crispy crumble". It came together because I always thought fruit crisps never had enough of the crispy bits to keep me happy. I'm all about carb, you see. A pizza, for me, is all about the dough, sushi all about the rice, and pie all about the crust. So I wanted a heftier crisp topping, but I also wanted to keep the crisp and not just turn it into a regular crumbly crumble. Hence born this recipe.

It actually came together pretty quickly. Starting with my usual crumble recipe, I added oats and nuts and a little more butter just to damn bless myself properly. You can use rolled oats, spelt flakes, or just about any uncooked cereal flakes or blend you have on hand. The same goes with the nuts - sliced almonds as I did here, chopped pecans should do well, or walnuts, or just about anything, really. A little bit of spice, a little bit of flour, and a little bit lot of melted butter and you're in business.

As for the fruits, you can use whatever stone fruits still hanging about in your market, or when Fall fruits arrive you can do a quince-apple-prune one like I did last year (but use this crispy crumble topping instead.)

For the crispy crumble
(This makes enough to top baking dishes like this, and this. It's easy to scale it up or down to fit your appetite.)

1 1/2 sticks butter (170g)
1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup sliced almonds
1 cup rolled oats, spelt flakes, or whatever blend of uncooked cereal flakes you have on hand
1 cup brown sugar, packed
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
a pinch of clove
1/4 tsp salt

In a small pot, melt the butter over medium heat. In a large bowl, dump the rest of the crispy crumble ingredients and stir to mix. Pour the melted butter over everything and stir with a fork until the dry ingredients are moistened and form clumps. Cover with plastic and let rest in the fridge while you prepare the fruits.

For the fruit filling
Enough fruit to fit your baking dish. In the large Le Creuset dishes I linked to above you'll probably need about 4-5 pounds of fruit. Cut up the fruits to big chunks, juice one lemon over them, toss with a little sugar (a little more if the fruit is sour) and a table spoon or two of flour (depending on how wet you think it might be). That's about it.

Put the fruit chunks in the baking dish, crumble the topping evenly over them. Place the baking dish on a foil-lined baking sheet to catch the drip or you might need to clean the oven afterwards. Bake in a pre-heated oven at 350F (175C) for about 50 minutes. (If you're doing it in a smaller dish you might want to check at 30 minutes or so.) You should see some of the fruit juices bubbling over and the topping should be golden brown, that's when you're done. Oh, yes, and your house should smell heavenly too. That's how you know.

The Foodie Handbook, the movie!

2009-09-16T08:39:19-07:00

Ok, not really, just a video trailer we did for the book. Watch it and enjoy (I hope.)

You can also see it in HD on YouTube.

And if you're in the New York area I hope to see you tomorrow at the beautiful Rizzoli bookstore for a cocktail reception and my very first book signing!

Rizzoli Bookstore

31 West 57th Street (between 5th & 6th Avenues)

New York, NY 10019

5.30-7pm

Impressions from New York, so far

2009-09-11T00:55:26-07:00