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(light upbeat music) – I love a good one-pan meal, and this dish from France, chicken jardiniere, is one of my absolute favorites. It’s easy, it’s elegant. The chicken remains the same, it’s braised lightly. But the vegetables change with the seasons; jardiniere means gardener’s. So it’s up to you, the cook or the gardener, what goes into the pot.
Let me show you how easy it is to make this. I’ve got here a whole chicken. Now you could buy three pounds of chicken parts already cut up if you wanna make it super easy on yourself. But sometimes those pieces can be a little mismatched. But it’s so easy to cut up your own chicken.
You can actually see where the leg is pulling away from this breast meat. There’s a little bit of dark color there. That means that that is just loose skin. And if I follow it down, the thigh is going to start to pull away from the spine of the chicken. And then I’m going to pop this little thigh bone out of its socket and use a very sharp knife to release the thigh as well.
So we have here the leg and the thigh. All right, so I’m just gonna flip this over and you can see here this little line of fat that is right over the joint. There we go. I’ve got two thighs and two drumsticks. So now let’s get to the rest of this.
Now we’re not using the wings here, but you definitely wanna throw these into to a bag, put ’em in your freezer, save enough of ’em and you can make some really good stock. Just pop the bone right out of the joint and cut around it. The breast meat is going to come away from the back meat here. You can use again, a pair of kitchen shears, sharp knife to cut right through the ribs. Sometimes it’s really hard to just go from the skin side through.
So what I like to do often is take my knife and go right in between the two breasts and kind of split that cartilage, just like that. It makes it a lot easier.
And then cut right through. All right, and now we’re going to cut each of these breast pieces roughly in half, but you can see this end is a lot thicker than this end here. So I’m going to cut it about here.
This is just going to help these pieces cook a bit more evenly. So now I wanna dry these off really, really well because we’re gonna brown them in some oil in our Dutch oven here. But if they’re moist at this point, even a little bit wet, there’s a danger that they will stick in the pan and they won’t get nice and brown. Just gonna season them with about a quarter teaspoon of salt and a quarter teaspoon of black pepper, and get all sides here. All right, let me just go wash my hands and we’ll continue.
All right, it’s time to get some color onto this chicken. Now in my Dutch oven here, I’ve got a teaspoon of vegetable oil and I’ve been heating it over medium-high, and I wanna look for a little bit of shimmer, little bit of smoke just to start because we want a nice, hot pan.
So I’m going to add the chicken skin side down. That’s a good sound. All right.
That looks good. So I’m gonna let that chicken get nice and brown on that first side, that’s gonna take about three minutes. So while that chicken is getting nice and brown, I’m going to prep some pancetta. Pancetta is just going to add a really savory flavor to this dish. There’s a lot of flavor packed in here.
Jacques Pepin is very famous for his chicken jardiniere recipe. And he said that his mother used chicken livers, but of course pancetta is a little easier to find, gives some great flavor.
So we wanna cut this into half-inch pieces. So I’m gonna go ahead and cut across and then into cubes. It’s been three minutes, so I’m gonna go ahead, flip them all over.
We’re gonna let that go three minutes on that second side. All right, so the chicken looks great. So I’m just gonna take these pieces out, put ’em on a plate. All right, we got some nice brown color on the chicken, brown color on the pot. That brown color means flavor.
So now into the pot I’m going to add that pancetta, and I’ve reduced the heat to medium here. I also have an onion that we’ve chopped nice and fine. A few minced garlic cloves. Little bit of fresh thyme here, it’s two teaspoons that we’ve minced, and a half a teaspoon of salt. So now I’m just gonna cook this until the onion gets nice and soft.
And I’ll keep an eye on it, but we’re gonna let it go about four minutes.
Now in the meantime, got a little bit more prep to do. Here comes the jardiniere part of our recipe. We’re using today mushrooms, potatoes and carrots. Now the potatoes, that’s the easy part.
Just use really small potatoes. This is 12 ounces of little tiny yellow potatoes. Carrots, we used four of them. Just peeled them, cut them into pretty big chunks, about one inch chunks, and eight ounces of white mushrooms.
Now I just need to prep a couple more mushrooms here.
Just trim the stems off. We cleaned these earlier. And for really big mushrooms like these, you wanna quarter them. But if they’re smaller, you could just cut them in half. So we wanna add a little bit of body to our braising liquid here.
I’ve got three tablespoons of all purpose flour. We’re gonna cook that for just a minute, really to get rid of its raw flavor. And now we’re gonna deglaze that pan, pull up some of those brown bits on the bottom. We’ll start off with a 3/4 cup of dry white wine. Something like a Sauvignon Blanc would be perfect here.
Just wanna whisk that in and two cups of chicken broth. So we’re looking for this to come up to a simmer. In the meantime, I’m still gonna pull some of those brown bits into this braising liquid. All right, so now it’s time to add in our vegetables; carrots, potatoes, the mushrooms. Just gonna season them with a half a teaspoon of black pepper here.
Give that a little stir. And now I’m going to add in our chicken, but not all of it. I’m going to add in the dark meat only. So just the thighs and the drumsticks. We’re gonna leave the breasts out of the mixture for now because they take less time to cook through than the thighs do.
So we’re gonna nestle in the thighs and the drumsticks here. And now this should start coming up to a simmer. So now I’m going to put a lid on it, and we’re gonna reduce the heat a bit. And we’re gonna let this simmer for about 25 minutes before we add the breast meat pieces. All right, so it’s been braising for 25 minutes.
Let’s take a look in the pot there. And you can see there are more juices in there than there was before.
That’s because the chicken and the vegetables have started to give off their own liquid. So now we can add the breast meat pieces. Really giving the dark meat a head start on the breast meat means that these will all cook evenly.
Nestle that in there along with any juices left on that plate. So I’m gonna let this come up to a simmer, cover it, and we’re gonna let this go for another 20 minutes until the breast meat registers 160 degrees and the thigh meat should register 175. (light upbeat music) All right, so it’s been about 20 minutes, so I’m going to check the temperature of both the thigh meat and the breast meat. All right, thigh meat, I’m looking for about 175. That looks great.
And then breast meat, 160. All right, so now I’m going to turn the heat off. We’re not quite done cooking yet. We’re going to add one more vegetable. That is a half a cup of peas.
Absolutely fine to use frozen peas. So a half a cup of peas straight from the freezer.
No need to thaw them. I’ll stir this in. So we’re gonna leave this for five minutes and let those peas soften.
And the chicken will continue to rise in temp. Now, in the meantime, we only have one more ingredient to prep and that is some fresh tarragon. You can also use fresh parsley here, but tarragon just gives such a lovely, kind of licorice bite to this. So I need a tablespoon of fresh tarragon. I love that almost anise flavor of tarragon.
It’s so French. Just need to season it with that tarragon. I’m gonna reserve a little bit for the platter itself. Stir it in. All right, it’s time to serve.
And I’ve got a big platter. It’s a rimed platter here. That’s very important ’cause this is a saucy dish. Of course you could serve this right out of the Dutch oven but it’s so pretty when you platter it. Smells so good.
All right, and I’ll start scooping up some of the vegetables, potatoes and the carrots and the mushrooms.
They’re all just perfectly tender. The rest of the pot goes right over it, all that beautiful sauce. I saved a little bit of that tarragon just so I can sprinkle it over the top. Let me go ahead and plate some for me.
Oh and all this saucy goodness. You don’t need to be stingy with this dish. The proof is in the chicken. Make sure that it’s not dried out. Mm.
That is so moist and beautifully cooked. I need to tuck into a carrot here. Beautifully tender. Piece of crusty bread, a glass of wine would make this the ultimate dinner. So to make this great recipe at home, brown pancetta to create a fond, give the dark meat a head start in the pot, then braise the chicken breast until cooked through.
So from Cook’s Country, the easy and elegant one-pot chicken jardiniere. Thanks for watching Cook’s Country from America’s Test Kitchen. So what’d you think? – Leave a comment and let us know which recipes you’re excited to make, or just say hi.
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