Dinner Jan 4, 2025
Note: Cornbread croutons made from Buttermilk Cornbread.
Chicken made 6 servings, green beans 4.
Ingredients:
3 tablespoons Vegetable Oil
1 Yellow Onion
2 Carrots
1 Whole Chicken
~226g Cornbread Croutons
½lb Ground Sausage
1 Sage Sprig
1 Egg
1 cup Stock
1lb Green Beans
½oz Dried Maitake Mushrooms
1 Tablespoon All Purpose Flour
Directions:
Preheat oven to 425°F (220°C).
Add oil to the Dutch oven.
Cut the onion into quarters. Finely chop one quarter, thinly slice another quarter, and cube the other two quarters. Add the cubed half onion to the Dutch oven. Peel the carrots and cut in half, add to the Dutch oven. Mince the sage leaves.
Debone the chicken, season the inside with salt and pepper.
Brown the sausage in a skillet over medium heat, breaking the sausage up with a spatula. Add half of the sausage to a medium mixing bowl.
Add cornbread, sage, the quarter of minced onion, egg, and stock to the sausage and mix to combine.
Add stuffing to the chicken, stuffing some into the legs and wings, and tie chicken up with butcher sting.
Place tied up chicken on top of the onion and carrots. Cover with lid cracked open and cook for 30 minutes, baste/ladle with drippings, and cook for 30 more minutes.
Remove chicken from dutch oven by the strings. Let rest for 5-10 minutes before slicing and serving.
While chicken cooks, hydrate the mushrooms in one cup of hot water.
Wash and trim the green beans. Cook as desired, I steamed mine.
Set aside the remaining half of sausage aside and cook the last quarter of sliced onion in the skillet over medium-low heat with the sausage grease. Turn heat to low and return sausage to the skillet. Squeeze out excess moisture from the hydrated mushrooms and also add to skillet. Add the flour and mix to coat everything.
Whisk in the mushroom broth (water the mushrooms were steeped in) to create a thin sauce. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Add the cooked green beans and toss to coat the beans in the sauce.
Final Notes:
Deboning:
⅛ ¼ ⅓ ½ ⅔ ¾
I was so sure that I was going to be faster this time. My first deboning time was 50 minutes.... and so was my second.
I got this chicken from a different store and found out they leave the neck on. I though that wouldn't be a big deal, I'd just remove it with the rest of the midsection. Turned out to be really annoying because the neck kept flopping around and getting in my way. Then the bigger issue was the discovery of the clavicle bones! Guess they're usually removed with the neck. There was a lot more meat around the wings, it really made the chicken look different from last time and from the video. It was difficult to find the right place to cut to remove the wing bone, and then there was a new bone in my way that I had to remove too. The top half of the breasts got annihilated as a result, but still tasted the same! And as I said last time,
saving the bones to make a stock helps me feel less bad about doing a shoddy job.
I took the whole leg bone out instead of breaking the bottom nub to leave in. I thought I had enough bone free and could just pull whatever was still connected to the joint/nub away, but I tore the skin open and stuffing kept falling and poking out.
Lessons learned:
-If you're going to remove the whole thing, be a little more gentle at that joint than any of the other parts.
-Or leave them in and just cut off those nubs before serving, that's what Pépin did in this other video of his show I found (It's also what I did last time, but it's nice to see how the pro does things.).
End result:
I did not listen to my own directions and just cut into the chicken right way and didn't let it rest. The stuffing was a mess, do not recommend! That was not as much of a problem when cutting the leftovers while cold from the fridge.
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