A Culinary, Cultural Adventure

Stuffed Chicken Breast With Mushroom Sauce

In contrast with the previous day, this was one of my worst practicals. One big lesson I took away from this practical is that sauces require attention and precision to make. My sauce failed to mix properly, was too oily, and just wasn't that good. I made it sloppily at the end, trying to multitask and do a bunch of things at the same time, and it boiled over, and I didn't do a good job whisking in the beurre manie, so there were still little bits of flour in it. . Well, it's definitely a good thing to learn now, rather than later.

So anyways -- this dish consists of chicken breasts, with a little pocket sliced into them filled with forcemeat (consisting of ground chicken meat, egg white, chives, cream, salt, and pepper), and steamed/braised in the oven. The technique for inserting the forcemeat is actually quite cool. After cutting a small incision from the top of the breast to the bottom (without breaking through), you put the forcemeat into a pastry bag (think inverted wizard cap with a small hole at the bottom), stick the hole of the pastry bag into the incision, and pipe the forcemeat into the incision. You can watch the forcemeat push the breast meat out and form a little tunnel into the heart of the breast (think of Bugs Bunny travelling horizontally below ground, pushing up the ground as he goes). :) This is then lightly browned, and put in the oven with a bit of mushroom water (water that mushrooms are cooked in), and a bit of chicken stock.

The sauce is created from the remainder of the chicken carcass (from which you cut the breasts), browned, with shallots, bay leaves, and thyme, deglazed with white wine, and left to cook/reduce with white chicken stock, and some mushroom trimmings. This is left to cook/reduce for 45 minutes, and then strained, deglazed, and combined with cream brought to a boil. This is then thickened (if necessary) with beurre manie (mixture of flour/butter), and seasoned to taste.

Mushrooms were done in two different ways in this practical -- turned, and simply sliced and cooked in lemon juice, salt, sugar, and butter. "turning" mushrooms is really for decorative purposes. You take a knife, and cut little curved strips from the top of the mushroom to the bottom of the cap. You do this all the way around. Chef warned us that we wouldn't be able to do this our first time, and that was definitely true. It's really hard! First, you have to be able to slice a 2 mm. thick strip of skin from the top, and then maintain and peel that all the way down to the bottom. You do this by taking a paring knife, holding it like a fan, setting the base of the blade at the top of the mushroom, and turning your wrist. Chef made it look easy. I mainly succeeded to peeling the entire top layer of skin from the mushroom. One funny note -- our translator translated the motion as "supination of the radius and ulna", which I loved. Perfectly descriptive, completely uncommon usage. Talking to him later, I found that he had finished 2 years of a medical degree before going into the culinary field (he was a chef and kitchen manager after that for 17 years, and now was working as a culinary translator). :)

posted by chezdavid @ 9:41 AM