Nick Bramham’s Pastis and Saffron Chicken with Aïoli
Nick Bramham’s Pastis and Saffron Chicken with Aïoli
A collaborative reinvention of a Provençal classic, perfect for late summer evenings. Text and photographs by Nick Bramham.
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Welcome to Vittles Recipes! This week’s columnist is Nick Bramham. You can read our archive of cookery writing here.
Nick Bramham’s Pastis and Saffron Chicken with Aïoli
A collaborative reinvention of a Provençal classic, perfect for late summer evenings.
This recipe came about after I hit an inspiration brick wall sometime last summer. Usually the menu falls into place relatively easily based on what’s in season, or I draw from a long, ever-growing list of potential dishes that I hope to get on the menu at some point. The successful dishes become part of the repertoire and are featured annually, often in a tweaked or revised form. But every now and then, there’s a gaping hole in the menu. Where previously I would have picked up a cookbook as a last resort, on this occasion I instead threw the dilemma out to one of my fellow cooks.
At the time, Quality Wines had only recently transitioned from being a one-chef operation – essentially a pop-up in a shop, with me schlepping a couple of induction hobs, a toaster, and a small combi oven up and down the stairs four nights a week – to a fully fledged à la carte restaurant, open for ten services a week with sixty-plus covers, and with a kitchen team of six. So, the idea of being able to delegate the creative process was still kind of novel. (I’ve since tried to make it a core part of how we operate, and I’m proud that the kitchen environment is increasingly collaborative. I feel extremely lucky to be working alongside such a talented team of cooks who get what we do – they understand the assignment.)
Like many restaurants, we have a library of ‘appropriate’ cookbooks, which are great sources of inspiration. My colleague JW chose a recipe from an old book he’d brought in: Recipes from Provence, by Andrée Maureau. The book contains rustic dishes, scribbled in cursive, and without photographs. It has the ersatz feel of a found notebook or journal and is full of recipes that are perhaps more inspiring than they are instructive – often just a brief list of ingredients without precise quantities, and with the method only loosely described. But some of the suggestions sounded irresistible, like ‘Chartreuse of tunafish’, ‘red mullet in raw ham papillotes’, and, the subject of this column, ‘chicken with pastis’.
Described as being for six hungry people, with a short list of suitably summery ingredients, Maureau’s recipe involves marinating two cut-up chickens in pastis and saffron (three of my favourite things). I was immediately sold – selfishly, I think I just wanted to eat it myself.
So, we got to work on seeing if it could be adapted for a restaurant context. Could it easily be scaled up, and how might we do so? Could we codify the relatively loose quantities and instructions to ensure consistency, irrespective of who was making it? Would chilling and reheating rob the dish of its soul, or might it develop the flavours? After a fair bit of trial and error, we settled on a method that yielded good results.
First – and this is a very important step that we apply to most of the meat that we cook – you should season the chicken the day before (some call this process ‘curing’ or ‘dry brining’). This ensures that the meat is seasoned to the core, and maximises juiciness and tenderness. Essentially, the salt slowly draws moisture to the surface of the meat, then via osmosis the now seasoned moisture is drawn back in. The salt breaks down some of the proteins, which allows them to hold on to more water throughout the cooking process than they ordinarily might. Read some Harold McGee if you’re still awake and don’t want to take my word for it.
The next step is to cook the legs and wings gently and slowly to coax them into tenderness without drying them out – too high a temperature can cause the meat to tighten and force out the moisture you’ve worked so hard to hold onto. Because the breasts are lean, they just need to come up to temperature and then they’re done, so they’re added towards the end of the cooking process, once the dark meat is tender. A long rest encourages the transference of flavour between the chicken and sauce while the former relaxes.
We’ve since used this method to cook chicken with different garnishes, most recently a riff on coq au Riesling. You can change the ingredients and flavours however you like really, providing you stick to the foundational principles – seasoning the day before, cooking carefully, then resting thoroughly. We’ve also recently made this pastis and saffron version with halved poussins, and I reckon it would work equally well with rabbit. You could even just use chicken legs if you like, both for ease and cost-effectiveness.
A side salad of some sort is a must with this dish, either an enthusiastically dressed green salad heavy on the crispy leaves, or bright juicy tomatoes, with plenty of good red-wine vinegar and black pepper. A bottle or two of chilled Bandol rosé wouldn’t go amiss either, with perhaps some pastis over ice as an aperitif.
To take what is already an extremely delicious and decadent dish to even dizzier heights, I like to have some punchy aïoli on the table, to smear on grilled bread before spooning the chicken and its juices on top. The combination of the tender chicken flesh, the hot, aniseedy, and deeply savoury broth, and the cool, heady garlic mayonnaise is truly one of the all-time-great culinary sensations.
Pastis and saffron chicken
