Dinner Dec 11, 2024
Note: If you prepare enough, you could cube the baguette a day in advance, let it go stale, and skip the baking step.
I would have done the typical egg and stock for the stuffing, but I didn't have either. Heavy cream was probably a weird choice of substitute, but it's what I had and it tasted good in the end.
Ingredients:
1 Demi Baguette
Powdered Sage
Onion Salt
1 Whole Chicken
1 lb Brussels Sprouts
3 Shallots
4 tablespoons Oil of preference
2 tablespoons Balsamic Vinegar
1 tablespoon Honey
2 sprigs Rosemary
1 bunch of Thyme
2 sprigs Parsley
2 sprigs Sage
¼ cup Heavy Cream
Kosher Salt
Fresh Ground Black Pepper
4 thin pats of Unsalted Butter
Directions:
Preheat oven to the lowest it can go, mine was 170°F (75°C).
Cube the baguette, place on a baking sheet, and season with some powdered sage, onion salt, and pepper. Bake for 20 minutes, stir, and bake for another 20 minutes. Cook time will vary depending on how low your oven will go, the bread was mostly dry and not browned.
While bread cubes are in the oven, debone the chicken.
Once bread is removed from the oven, preheat to 425°F (220°C).
Wash and trim Brussels sprouts, cut in half, and add to a Dutch oven.
Slice the shallots, add half to the dutch oven and the other half to the sheet pan with the bread cubes.
Add oil, balsamic vinegar, honey, and some salt and pepper to the Brussels sprouts and toss to evenly coat. Place one of the rosemary sprigs and most of the thyme on top.
Remove the leaves from the other rosemary sprig's tough stem as well as the thyme, parsley, and sage if needed. Finely chop the herbs and add to the sheet pan.
Pour cream over the bread cubes and mix everything together with your hands.
Season the inside of the chicken with salt and pepper, add stuffing, and tie chicken up with butcher sting.
Place tied up chicken on top of Brussels sprouts and herbs. Cover with lid cracked open and cook for 55 minutes, place butter pats on top of the chicken, and cook for 5 more minutes or until skin has browned a little more.
Remove chicken from dutch oven by the strings. Let rest for 5-10 minutes before slicing and serving. Pour any remaining liquid from the Dutch oven the sliced chicken.
Final Notes:
Deboning:
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:
Chicken did seem to not be on the edge of overcooked this time, but it was still really pale. The butter was a last second decision to get some color in the skin. In the new video linked above, Pépin actually gives a cook time and temp of 400°F (200°C) for an hour. He also left his pan uncovered. So gonna try that next time!
Brussels sprouts ended up a little mushy, which I figured would happen. But these were from my CSA and pretty small compared to what you'd get from a grocery store. It might have been perfect if they were bigger. Either way, it's always nice to only have one cooking apparatus, and they tasted pretty good.
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