Poulet au Porto
On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me – three french hens… and Cook Local gives you Poulet au Porto.
This is one of those recipes, like Beef Wellington, that seems more complicated than it really is. When we thought about french hens, we knew right away that we’d need to make a Julia Child recipe. After all, she did chicken like no one else. I think, in many ways, Julia demystified chicken for many people. We spent some time looking through her various cookbooks to figure out what would be a good representative Julia recipe. We came up with Poulet au Porto. Literally Chicken with Port. Nearly all of the ingredients can be found locally and plus, you get to set the recipe on fire. FIRE! Ever since we flambéed our first mushrooms, we’ve never turned down a chance to set a dish on fire.
The dish begins with Julia’s basic roasted chicken recipe. I won’t actually reproduce that here, other than to give you a couple of links. You could probably reproduce this recipe with a rotisserie chicken from the store, although if you are local to Seattle, do yourself a favor and buy a Stokesberry Farm chicken. I’ve had chicken from a number of farmers market vendors. I’ve never had a bad chicken. They are all flavorful and delicious in their own way. But I’ve found that the Stokesberry birds are possibly the best of the best. The flavor is pure chicken. I can’t describe it any other way. You don’t need to do much to their chicken. A little salt, a little pepper, a little roasting, and you’ve got yourself a delicious and nutritious dinner. Of course, you can do much more to it as well, like make Poulet au Porto.
This dish comes together pretty quickly and is sure to impress your guests or your family. The recipe is written for you roasting your own chicken and there’s one reason for that… the pan drippings. If you’re using a rotisserie chicken, you’re going to be missing out on all of that wonderful flavoring. I’ll add some additional instructions in the notes for using a pre-cooked bird.
Poulet au Porto from Julia Child (various sources)
A creamy chanterelle
- 3 pound whole chicken
- 1 lb mushrooms, your choice on type, de-stemmed
- 1/4 cup water
- 1.5 Tbsp butter, divided
- 1/2 tsp lemon juice
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1 cup cream
- 1/2 Tbsp cornstarch
- Salt and pepper
- 1/2 Tbsp shallots, minced
- 1/3 cup Port
- 1/4 cup Cognac
- Start your chicken roasting in a roasting pan that can go from oven to stovetop. After about 30 minutes, you can go onto step 2.
- If the mushrooms are large, quarter them. Otherwise leave them whole.
- Boil the 1/4 cup of water, 1/2 Tbsp of the butter, lemon juice, and salt in a medium sauce pan.
- Add the mushrooms and boil slowly for 8 minutes.
- Reserve the cooking liquid.
- Mix the 1/2 Tbsp cornstarch with 1 Tbsp of the cream in a small bowl.
- Pour the rest of the cream and the cream/cornstarch mixture into the pan with the mushrooms.
- Simmer for 2 minutes and then remove from the heat, add some salt and pepper, and set aside.
- Remove the roast chicken from the oven and transfer the chicken to a carving board.
- If you’ve got more than 2 Tbsp of roasting juices in the pan, remove some of them. Otherwise move on to the next step.
- Set the roasting pan on the burner and turn the heat to medium.
- Add the shallots and cook for 2 minutes.
- Add the port and the reserved mushroom water and boil rapidly, deglazing the pan, until there’s only 1/4 cup of liquid left.
- Pour in the mushrooms and cream mixture.
- Simmer for 2-3 minutes and season if necessary.
- Cut up the chicken (Ideally you’ll have removed it from the oven about 10 minutes ago and it will still be warm).
- Transfer the chicken to a buttered, flame-proof cooking pan large enough for the chicken to not be piled on top of itself.
- Sprinkle the chicken with salt.
- Cook the chicken over medium-high heat until the chicken starts to sizzle.
- Be very careful with this next step.
- Pour in the cognac and using a long kitchen match with your face averted, light the mixture. It is best to light the fumes along the inside of the pan, rather than the liquid itself.
- Shake the cooking pan slightly until the flames die down.
- Pour in the mushroom mixture, cover and steep for 5 minutes on low heat, and serve.
Poulet au Porto
Notes: This isn’t the simplest dish, but it isn’t difficult either. None of the steps are hard, there are just a number of them. Make sure you read the recipe a few times and know what you’ll need to do when. If you’re really worried about the flambe step, then skip it. You’ll get a good flavor just adding the cognac and cooking for a few extra minutes to burn off the alcohol. The chicken should very nearly fall off the bone and the rich mushroom sauce really calls out for a loaf of crusty bread to sop it all up. I can’t think of a dish I’ve made recently that felt more decadent. We used chanterelle mushrooms since those were what was in season, but you could use a wide variety of different mushrooms for differing flavor.
If you want or need to use a pre-cooked chicken, then you won’t have pan drippings. You can substitute some butter and lard mixed together, melted to compensate for this. No, the flavor won’t be the same. But you will at least get a bit of depth and richness from the combination of the two.
