It starts with a poached chicken and it’s all downhill from there.
I mean that in a good way. The uphill struggle is bad, right? Is downhill easy? ‘All downhill’ has always sounded chaotic, crumbling, and bad, but I think it’s meant like downhill in the skiing sense; little effort for an easy ride home, gravity doing the work. Anyway, I poached a chicken whole and from there it was plain sailing, maybe that’s a better metaphor. I’ll start again.
I saw a tweet or an Instagram message, or something of that ilk, about the idea of the never-ending soup. Something like a ribollita becomes and minestrone becomes a vague veg soup becomes a tasty amorphic thing, etc, etc, ad Infinitum, lovely jubbly. Adding a new veg, or rice, a pulse or pasta, or a rind of something, more stock, or a spoonful of bouillion or miso or soy or Worcestershire sauce or gentleman’s relish can keep a soup going for seemingly weeks on end, and each time its a new and more tasty version of the thing you had before. I don’t love soup, per se, but I love cooking and thrift and one thing becoming another, a lot; and the year has not exactly zipped off to the best start, so having a soup in the fridge that could nourish and soothe when called upon at all times of the day and night has been no bad thing.
So as I tried to say initially. It started with a poached chicken.
Now a whole poached chicken is a thing of wonder in and of itself. It is the simplest and best way to cook a chicken, the only, and I mean only, downside being an insipid flaccid skin on the thing that is very hard to redeem, much as I have tried. You can refrigerate the poached chicken and then run it through a hot oven, but then you undo some of the perfect cooking on the chicken itself. I tend to simply shrug off the plaid fleshy skin, literally and figuratively, and enjoy the perfectly cooked chicken itself in whatever way might please me on that day.
I am skipping somewhat ahead though, aren’t I? The gospel according to poached chicken goes thus.
You’ll need:
1 x good chicken, the best you can buy, there is no hiding in this recipe
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