How to make: Chicken Hongroise

So today, something a little bit different but it's a one pot wonder but with a difference. This is a dish thrown back to the 1990s. I used to cook this at Claridge's. This is chicken onguas, a Hungarian chicken dish with paprika, tomatoes, a little bit of chilli, a little bit of white wine, a few onions in there, served with sour cream and coriander. Absolutely fabulous, stick around. It's for this dish we need some beautiful chicken, bone in very importantly, the bone in those thighs. Thighs are best for this one. We've got a few tomatoes that have been peeled already and we're going to some peppers which we're going to peel as well and I'll show you that. We've got some white onions, bit of garlic, we've got some spring onions as well, we've got a little red chilli, we've got some smoky paprika, we've got some coriander, white wine, that's flour with paprika in it already, that's chicken stock, that's sour cream to finish it with. Let's get this done. Right so dusting that chicken in the paprika flour, giving it a good rub around, it's going to help thicken our sauce and protect our chicken before it goes in. Turn that heat down now, nice dusting of flour in there. Right let's go with a little bit more salt on top of those thighs as well, a little bit more of that flour. This flour is going to help protect the chicken, going to embed that paprika in at this point, it's also going to give us a bit of thickening agent and kind of viscosity to the overall stew at the other end. It'll be quite wet as well so that's what that's for. Right while that is happening we're going to move on to a few vegetables. We've got some spring onions, some white onions which what I'm going to do is set myself up for success here. I want a couple of white onions which we're going to thinly slice for this. Everything's kind of in strips so it's I guess in some ways it's got that like stroganoff sort of feel to it, so it's all in sort of strips. We've got some tomatoes here that have been blanched for 10 seconds, ice water and then peeled and just lift out, cut them in quarters, lift out the centre. We don't want any of that, we just want the tomato. I haven't cooked this dish for over 30 years, in fact well no maybe not true, maybe I have cooked it at home a couple of times, my family things like that, but I genuinely haven't cooked this in a professional environment for about 30 years. Got a chilli in there, that's going to come into play in a minute. We need that warmth, it's kind of all about peppers and paprika and sweetness and so it's a Hungarian stew. We're going to finish it with these, so we could do that in a minute, but for the moment the first thing we need is the onion, so nicely finely sliced onions and the pepper wants to be skinned. So we're going to get the pepper, there's a couple ways of skinning peppers right, you can use a blow torch, you can you can blow towards the outside and it will go black, put it under cling film in a bowl, as it sweats the skin will just peel off and leave the pepper pretty much raw but able to peel off the skin. You can peel the skin off with a peeler, that's rogue, don't do that, or you can run the peppers over a barbecue or a naked flame, a gas hob for example, more difficult nowadays, lots of people got inductions. So what we're going to do, we're going to stick that on the barbecue. Okay so starting to crisp up nicely, you see that colour's all coming through from the paprika, but let these go a minute more, just nice and gently like that. We'll leave that while we go sort our peppers out. Spent years of my life standing over this grill looking at customers, questioning my life choices, looking what the f*** Sammy was burning next, huh? Didn't I? Right just quickly Sam over here, let's flip this chicken over, nice crispy skin there, pretty happy with that. I'm going to turn that over, look how crispy that is, it's beautiful. Just going to seal the other side a little bit and that's all looking good. I don't want to turn this into a big sort of, this is not supposed to be a really gastronomic thing, it's nice and simple, it happens in 35-40 minutes, everyone's happy and you've got this most delicious stew. So I'm just going to, I want plenty of garlic in this, I think it's really important. So just put, just chop the garlic, put a bit of salt in there, use a knife and just smash the garlic like that. The salt helps because it makes it grip onto the garlic and makes it puree. See that? It's quite an old school way of doing it, you've got garlic presses now and all crushed garlic. Beautiful thing, strong like that, it's very strong like that garlic, when you use it like this it's powerful. That's going to sit with my onions. Okay my chicken is now going to come out and we can start to build this and we're going to start with the onions right. So the onion is going to go in there with the garlic in there, onions in, onions going to lift off all of that sediment on the bottom, let's turn the heat up a little bit, let's go in with a little bit more salt just to compensate for the onions. Go in with a nice big teaspoon of smoked paprika, the best one I know is from Marverco or from Brindisa, those are the best smoked paprikas I know and those are the ones I use at home, Marverco or Brindisa, nice smoked paprika. This is drawing up all that sediment from the chicken, really important and it's just allowing the onions to just sweat down. So keep that on a low to medium heat while you prepare your tomatoes and your peppers. Right let's get into these tomatoes and peppers, I'm just gonna slice these tomatoes into like a rough julienne, doesn't need to be neat but it's all supposed to be nice lines. The chilli also into like a julienne, really beautiful. Right store that over there a second, they're going in quite late actually the tomatoes. Let's go back to these peppers, have a quick look at those, my small knife, you could run these under water it's easier actually but they will just peel, see that, it just peels off Sam. Do that with a blowtorch, do it over a naked flame, do it under a grill, you could do it on a barbecue like I did but ultimately you just want to get that on there. You could try it on your induction actually, turn your induction on full, put your peppers on there and just stand back for about a week, see what happens. Yeah I think it's important to, I think it's important to peel the peppers because the skin won't cook down in the time this whole thing takes to cook. So getting rid of the skin because it's really tough, it's quite important to get rid of that. So also while you're in the water there what you can do, just take off the end and then just take out the core, the root and that will all just get rid of the seeds. Then we've got a nice peeled pepper that doesn't have a little bit of black on there's because it adds a little bit of charred flavour, that's nice but ultimately the skin doesn't melt down and cook and it's quite tough, it's quite bitter. So I definitely prefer peppers with no skin on. Here's just cut them like that, cut them like that, take out this white membrane and then line them up like so. Let's go back to our onions here Sam, have a quick look, looking good, smelling absolutely fantastic. Right this is pretty much ready for the peppers so I need to get a bit of a wiggle on now, just trying to get that white membrane out, that's all it is. Even that up so I can julienne it a bit nicer, that can go in the bin, that goes away and then we can just julienne the peppers and they're going to go straight into the onions. Don't have to be this fine, doesn't really matter so much. Right in goes my charred peeled peppers onto my onions like so, starting to come together now you see that, starts to look quite exciting, got stroganoff vibes going on. Let's give that a minute to cook now, bring that together, looking good. Wow see that, this is about pan control and temperature of that pan, keep the control of the pan and you're always going to get the result you want. If you turn that heat up really high now you're just going to be battling with burning onions. Keep it at this temperature, we're drawing out the moisture, we're working those ingredients and getting what we want out of them and creating this. That's exactly what I wanted, create that please. This is just prep for the end really, so I'm going to finish the dish with some of these lovely spring onions, they can sit there, it's almost like adding chives and then the rest of it I'm going to put in now with the tomatoes. So that's, you can hear that now, come over to the pan Sam, you can hear it start to fry now, that means the water's basically gone from the peppers. All right so you get that, it's it's gone from like sweating away now so in goes the spring onions, in goes the tomatoes and the chilli and in goes the white wine. White wine's bringing acidity, bringing liquid to the dish, we can increase the temperature a little bit now because we want to lift that up a bit. Spring onions are just bringing another texture, another layer. Right bring that wine down a little bit and then we can move to getting the chicken back in and building this stew up. You see that your wine's reduced now and why I know that is because actually, you see that, that's all now tomato juices. So chicken can come back into our pan, come back and join the party and then it's time for the liquids. The liquids for this are going to be a little bit of passata, not too much because I don't want to turn it into tomato soup and then chicken stock. This could be water or it could just be a stock cube and water, that's fine, no problem but the volumes are really important. So chicken needs to stick out of the top, we want those chicken skins to crisp up a little bit and stay out of the liquid so they don't go all soggy. We want that stew to happen in its own time. So that's done and as always it's now going to get itself a lovely cartouche. Oven is set at 180 degrees, pop a cartouche on top and that's going to get 25 minutes at 180. So you've all seen me do this before 1 million times, I'm not going to continue to do these forever. Is it the right size of the pan? Is it the right size of the pan? We love this game, we love this game, holy ****. Right, spoon goes on top, beautiful, in it goes, easy peasy. That's a one-pot wonder. Okay so that chicken stew has had 30 minutes now and that's absolutely perfect for that, just four chicken thighs on the bone, 30 minutes is plenty. A little bit of resting is important so take it out and give it a couple of minutes rest if you can but ultimately this is what it should look like. Let's take that away.