" The Secret To The Unlocking Chicken Pot Pie Perfection"

Now, I've always had a problem with chicken pot pie. On paper, the concept sounds amazing, but there's two main problems I see in chicken pot pie that often leave me disappointed. Number one, the puff pastry steams from the inside out. So you get a crispy top, but inside you get a soggy puff pastry, a little doughy, a little gummy, no good. Number two, it's often made with chicken breasts that we often then boil to the point of death. I've been thinking for years about how I would fix these problems. And my solution is instead of baking everything together, why don't I make the ultimate crispy puff pastry bowl and serve the delicious pot pie filling with braised chicken thighs straight inside of it? So finally, you can eat a chicken pot pie, perfectly crisp puff pastry, perfectly tender and juicy chicken, no sog. This is the reverse chicken pot pie. First step we need to do is prep the puff pastry bowls, because once we work with them, it's gonna soften, and we need it to firm up with all the butter in there in the fridge before we bake them. So it's gonna be the first thing that we do. We're gonna need a bigger boat. So I've got here two bowls. Ironically, they're Babish bowls. He sent me them years ago. I'm gonna place them on a sheet tray. This is what we're gonna drape our puff pastry over to create the bowl. And here, this is a really good brand of puff pastry. You probably will never see me make puff pastry from scratch. This is an upgraded product that I've seen on the market recently, and this is just fine. Now this has been sitting out, so it's nice and pliable, which is what we're gonna need it to be. First thing we need is a little flour on the board. Try and distribute that flour all over the sticky parts. All we gotta do is roll it out just a little bit. Basically from that point, we wanna cut it in half. Now we can basically just try and see if we need to roll it out a little thinner or wider. And that looks kinda good to me. We're gonna cut the trim right there, and I wanna really mold it to the bowl. Slide it onto the sheet tray, then we can repeat with the other side. Now what we can do with the trim, square it off, and then we can make a lattice. Just cut little thin strips. And we lay four down one way. Dab a little water at the end. Dab on some interchanging ones like that, and then layer the other one on top. Flip it and press so that water sort of glues it together. And then you just sort of braid them. Interchange them like that. And once you got a four by four square, you can trim the excess. Now the only other thing left to do is we're gonna take a fork, and right in the flat surface of the bowl, we're just gonna prick it so it doesn't kind of puff up too much. And we have a flat bottom for the bowl to stand on. Now the dough goes back into the fridge to chill before we egg wash it and bake it. Now I'm dragging today, and while this cooks, I need a pick-me-up. But I can't make it out to my coffee shop. I'm shooting. But I can still get my pick-me-up thanks to our sponsor today, Commateur. Commateur's a new way to make, or should I say melt, coffee at home with no machine. They offer pour-over quality coffee from some of the world's best specialty coffee roasters delivered in frozen, recyclable aluminum capsules. They brew the coffee at 10X strength, and then immediately flash-freeze them into these pucks to lock in freshness and flavor. It's a completely new format of coffee. If you're a hot coffee lover, it's simple. All you gotta do is peel back the lid, push the capsule out using the eject button at the bottom, and then melt the fully frozen puck with six to eight ounces of hot water. And boom, you've got a fresh-brewed coffee in an instant that tastes like a barista just brewed it in your own home. All the brewing has been done for you. More of a latte guy? Simply add some ice to a cup and pour over about six ounces of milk, and then add one of the melted pucks straight to it. I, myself, am more of an iced coffee drinker. Again, we're just gonna melt the puck under some water, add about six to eight ounces of cold water, add it to a cup, top it off with some ice. And I really like the Humbler by Proud Mary. It's a medium blend with notes of chocolate, fudge, caramel, and date. What I love about Cometeer is you can make any kind of coffee you want. You don't need any special gear, there's no real cleanup, and the results are delicious. And unlike instant coffee, Cometeer's never concentrated, dried, or evaporated, so it never loses any flavor from the bean to the cup. And unlike standard coffee pods, the coffee's always fresh and never stale. Each cup of Cometeer also packs twice the coffee and caffeine versus a standard cup or pot, so you're getting much better value per cup. And the aluminum capsules are 100% recyclable. And if you haven't tried Cometeer, you can now get $30 off your first order when you head to Cometeer.com backslash not another cooking show, or visit my link down in the description. Next up, we're gonna need a classic mirepoix. Now, a mirepoix is two parts onion to one part carrot, and one part celery. Cut the top off the onion, cut it in half, peel off the layers, and we're gonna take the onion, and we're gonna look for the lines naturally running across the surface, and we're gonna take our knife and follow those lines, even sort of like the angle that they're at. So I'm gonna go in at the bottom at a little bit of an angle, and then as I make my way across the top of the onion, straightening it out until I start to get to the other curve and I start to angle the knife down towards the center again. And you go across it and dice it, and everything's a nice, perfect little dice. Now, that's one part onion. Just peel it real quick. We're gonna cut it where it tapers, stand it up, slice it into little planks, and then cut those into strips, and then dice them up. For the celery, trim the dry edges, cut it in half, and cut those halves in half again. Each stalk cut into four pieces, and just cut those up into a dice. Now, that's a mirepoix. And then the garlic, just like always, slice it in half. Peel back the skins, and we'll just slice them really thin. Then I've got a little bundle of rosemary and thyme. Not too much, I wanna overpower it. So I'm going to take a string. I'm just gonna start to wrap it around, create a nice, tight bundle, and then tie it to the excess. And then just cut it so we can tie it to the rim of the bowl. You're also gonna need about a half cup of frozen corn and a half cup of frozen peas. A cup, whatever you want. I gotta use my stuff. And then, of course, we have our chicken thighs. Important to note, I grew up a dark meat chicken hater, simply because my family didn't know how to cook it properly. If you cook this like a chicken breast to the same temperature till, like, it's done, and you're worried of overcooking it, you're gonna eat rubber chicken. However, if you overcook it, like the same way you would overcook a short rib or a pork butt until it breaks down and all the muscle fibers get tender, that is when dark meat becomes succulent and juicy. A southern fried chicken wing or thigh that melts in your mouth rather than you kind of pulling it apart. So what we're gonna do instead of use breast, we're gonna use thighs. We're gonna braise them whole in the mixture and then shred them up, kind of like you would chicken soup, but this is gonna allow us depth of flavor. We're gonna get some browning in the pan rather than, like, oftentimes just pulling a rotisserie chicken and adding to it. So add some depth of flavor. We're just gonna dredge it in a little flour before we sear them. Then we're gonna be deglazing with some sherry wine, some dry sherry wine. That's gonna add depth of flavor, a little, mm, in the back. We're gonna be using some chicken broth. This is a good brand I like. And of course, you can use milk, but I like it a little thicker since we're not gonna bake it into the oven. We're just gonna be almost serving it more like a soup in a bowl. So we're using heavy cream to make it thick, but it's gonna be lightened out by the stock. So we're gonna get a little flour to dredge the chicken, season it, and three tablespoons for our roux, which will also require us to add three tablespoons of butter. Now we're ready to cook. Now, since we're using chicken that is skinless, we're going to season the chicken thighs and then very lightly dredge them in flour. Without it, the chicken won't really develop any sort of crust. Then into a hot, preheated Dutch oven coated with some olive oil, we're going to add the chicken and sear it really well on that first side until it's nice and golden brown. And this is the benefit of cooking the chicken in the pot, is flavor development, fond development. On the bottom of the pan, that's gonna make this chicken pot pie filling more delicious than an average chicken pot pie, which cooks a whole chicken separately. Once the first side is browned, flip it. We don't need a super hard crust on the other side. And then we're gonna go ahead and sear off the remaining chicken thighs. And once they're all cooked and seared, we can remove them from the pot. To the pot, we're gonna add the mirepoix and season it with some salt. And we're gonna cook it for about two to three minutes or until the vegetables become soft and translucent. After a few minutes, add the sliced garlic and allow that garlic to soften, brown around the edges and become fragrant. To that, we're going to add about two tablespoons of unsalted butter, both to help the vegetables cook and soften. It's also necessary for the roux we're going to build later. Once all the vegetables are soft, then we can go ahead and add in the flour. And we wanna stir that to combine it with the fat. And we wanna stir that constantly to cook that raw taste out of the flour. After a minute or two, when the flour and the roux is lightly browned, we're gonna deglaze with some dry sherry wine. And you're gonna see it thicken almost instantly, but keep stirring it and lower the heat so we can cook out all of the alcohol. Once you can take a sniff and that alcohol doesn't burn your nostrils, then we can start to add in the chicken stock, roughly about two to three cups. Then we can go ahead and start to work in about a half pint or so of heavy cream. And then I'm going to tie my little herb bundle to the pot so it's easy to remove later. We can add the chicken back to the pot and we're gonna move it over to a super low burner. And we're gonna cook this for at least one hour, or more importantly, until the chicken is tender and able to easily be shredded. And we don't want the consistency of this to be too thick right now, but we don't want it to be too thin either. It's going to reduce, but not by a ton. So I might add a touch more stock to compensate for the longer cook now, but just keep an eye out on it and stir it constantly, cover it and let this go for an hour. Whenever I braise anything, I do just like to let it sit off the stove, covered and just relax, absorb the liquid, all of the flavor, get even more tender and retain more moisture. So while that chills for a little bit, we can get started on our now chilled puff pastry. Should be firm, shouldn't be soft like it used to be. Now we just need an egg wash. One egg, we just want to beat it really well. And we're just going to then take our egg wash and brush it on the surface. Get it nice and everywhere. So we get a nice golden brown. Our lattice as well. Now we've got our oven that's been preheating at 400 degrees. Pop these guys in. That should take about 30 minutes or so. Again, we're looking for the puffing around the edges, golden brown color. And that's really going to be when we determine when to take this out. Now, after the chicken has relaxed, we can go ahead and remove it. Get our herb bundle out of there as well. Now, trust me, handling the chicken this way, it's going to be so much better. Cooking it in all that liquid, succulent. So now you can let this cool. You can take two forks and just start pulling, just like you would pull pork. You could chop them up into cubes, however you want to treat them. We just want to break it down, fill out the pot. You could just glove up and then start to really just shred it into shards. I mean, this in a taco or something would be amazing. Now, before we add that back in, this tastes amazing. It is rich. Now, if you wanted to add a little acidity to this, I have a little Dijon mustard in a bowl. And now sometimes when you add Dijon mustard to a sauce, it can become a little split. So if we take some of the cooking liquid and add it to the mustard, we can start to almost make like a slurry with it so that it incorporates better into the sauce. Then you add that into the mix. It just wakes it up, adds a brightness, it's a nice touch. Now in with the chicken, in with the corn and the peas and stir that all together. Now we need to get this back onto the stove and allow the frozen peas and carrots, carrots? Frozen peas and corn to cook a little bit. They're cooked, we just want to get them hot and get the whole mixture hot, ready for the puff pastry. Now I've got some fresh chives. I'm gonna roll them up towards the bottom. I'm gonna trim off the edges and we want to cut really fine mints of chives for garnish. And then after about 35 minutes or so, you've got these beauties. I mean, are you kidding me? We've reached perfection here. So we need to let this cool for a minute. Here's our lattice, it's cute. Gives it the illusion of pie, you know, at the end, just sticking out. Now all I have to do is taste, check for seasoning, need salt, and then I finish with a little Parmesan cheese, grate it in. That's the consistency, nice and thick, creamy, not clumpy. It's still kind of light because it's mainly made up of stock. To me, that looks incredible. Look how beautiful. And now the hard part, we got to remove this. Very gently, use a little pastry. I'm just gonna gently just try and release it. Now everything is cooked, everything's puffed. This should be airy, fluffy, and crisp all the way through. Oh no, I smashed my lattice. Oh, I got to do a new one. Okay, I baked a new one, potentially a better one. Problem averted. First thing I want to do is grate some Parmesan cheese in the center, just to kind of give a barrier of protection inside of the bowl and with the filling. I like to have a little bit of like kind of overflowing. Finish with the chives and a little bit more Parm. See the flaky layers puffed up. Speechless, crisp puff pastry, succulent, moist, tender, juicy, chicken stewed in like a veloute, chicken pot pie filling, extra crispy. In case you want to dip it, the filling is rich, but you get those little pops of sweetness from the corn and the peas, a little acidity from the mustard, it's just a beautiful rendition on a classic dish. And for you texture freaks out there like me, it's pitch perfect. It's just one of those things you're gonna have to try. My recipe's gonna be down in the description. Check out our Patreon membership going on. All of the YouTube videos get released a day early and ad free, plus we have a cooking school running where you tune new lessons separate from everything here, have a live stream, give you guys homework, and it's like more interactive school. That's all that I have today. I'll see you next time. Until then, take care of yourself and go feed yourself.