Welcome to a weekly feature on my blog – Ben’s Zone. Written by husband… Ben. A foodie, coffee obsessed, ex-smoking, ex-drinking and Ridgeback loving Dad. Who is also seriously into his fitness. You can find him on the blog (mostly) on Sundays. Enjoy!
Poularde a la Bourgeoise Recipe
Facebook is a funny old thing. For some people it’s an obsession, for others, the vanguard of scary ‘big tech’, my experience is that it’s just a way to find stuff I like. I find it suggests a bunch of stuff that’s relevant to my interests, from bands I might like to food I might want to eat.
A few weeks ago, FB kept on suggesting a chap who makes videos under the name of ‘Glen and Friends‘. Glen is a Canadian chap who finds and demonstrates all kinds of old recipes in an amiable and relatable way. He clearly knows his way around a kitchen and I’ve enjoyed a lot of his videos.
This week he posted a recipe for Poularde a la Bourgeoise and I thought I’d give it a try (with some modifications) and share the result. I liked the look of the recipe because it sounded tasty (not looked, more on that later) and I get bored of cooking the same roast chicken all the time.
The recipe is French, as the name suggests, and from a traditional background. With that in mind, I know that making any change is sacrilege but I don’t care one bit.
I wouldn’t know where to get a poularde, which is an older neutered hen that’s been fed a rich diet and so, like Glen, I used a chicken from the butchers.
The recipe has a nice ‘one pot’ aspect to it as it uses the cooking veg and liquids to form a savory coulis. The downside is that, unlike traditional roasting or casseroling, the chicken is not browned and so it looks a little anemic on serving.
So what we’re doing here is pot roasting a chicken with onion and some root veg and halfway through we’re putting some wine in. I don’t drink and I don’t take alcohol in food so I’m substituting a grape juice drink with some wine vinegar added to sour it a bit.
Ingredients
3-4 onions, peeled and roughly chopped
2 carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
2 parsnips, peeled and roughly chopped
1 leek (because I had one to hand), peeled and roughly chopped
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 chicken (1.5 – 1.8Kg)
2 glasses of white wine or grape juice with vinegar
2 sticks rosemary
4 sprigs thyme
4 sprigs sage
100g butter
Method
1. Pre-heat oven to 200 C
2. Put the butter into a large casserole with half onions
3. Put the chicken into casserole breast side down
4. Cover with rest of vegetables
5. Put herbs in
6. Put lid on the pot
7. Bake for 1 hour
8. Remove from oven and pour in the liquid
9. Bake for another hour
10. After 2 hours, check for doneness (ideally with a thermometer)
11. Rest for 30 mins
12. During rest, remove herbs from the pot and blend other ingredients, with a stick blender if you have one, if not, in a food processor.
13. Serve whole chicken to table on a bed of coulis.
As this was a divergence from our normal Sunday lunch, I kept the rest of the lunch standard, roast potatoes, broccoli, and asparagus and, yes, Yorkshire puddings but ideally, I’d probably serve this with some fresh crusty bread and green veg.
