The Soul of Corsica: Traditional Lemon & Sage Braised Chicken

Welcome back! So in this episode I'm going to be sharing with you a recipe from another place in France that not many people talk about which is Corsica. Corsica is an island, it's a French island off the south coast of France near Toulon and it's one of my favorite destinations for holidaying with this town of Ajaccio which is the birthplace of Napoleon, would you believe it? And it's a beautiful town and Corsica is a mix of Italian, French and you know all the kind of melting pot culture that you can find in there and that reflects a lot in the actual food. So some of the recipes are made with local produce and very hard to replicate unless you've got these produces. Some other ones are more Italian like this recipe that I've shared already on the channel which is a beautiful ragout, it's half Italian half French, absolutely a must try, link in the video description. And today what I want to show you is the other part that sometimes the recipe have in Corsica which is that more Mediterranean kind of style and they're very easy as well. The recipe we're going to be making is a simple chicken with lemon and sage. And sage, it's interesting because it's not the kind of herb I use a lot at all. I've got it growing in the garden but I never use it and it's got plenty of health benefit. When I was reading about it, read about it, you'll see for sage there's so much to go for. So I think a one pot chicken with sage and lemon is going to be absolutely beautiful. So get to your apron, get to the kitchen, clean everything, get ready and let's cook. And now let's begin. So very simple recipe, no complex ingredient. It is chicken, you can use a whole chicken or just pieces of chicken that you buy in the shop. I've got a whole chicken that I've broken down, two legs, two chicken breasts and I've kept the carcass on here. I'll show you why in a bit. For the rest we've got some cream, white wine, onion, very important pink peppercorn, the lemon and of course the sage. This is important, very fresh sage. I'm adding here some parmesan which is what some recipes use and I know in Corsica they use parmesan. So I'm going to add it because it's going to really add something to that recipe. Now let me show you just the few important steps we need to do here especially with the lemon. So one very important thing on here is the lemon. We want to fight really the acidity and in that particular recipe you don't actually slice lemon for the cooking. We're just going to be using the juice of that lemon, not just the one lemon and we're going to be grating some of the zest. Now when you grate the zest of a lemon you have to be very careful not to go too deep. Sorry, kind of go easy. So you can see you don't want to go too deep to have too much of that white skin because that is where the bitterness is. So it's a very light kind of grating. You see you want to keep a little bit of the on the surface and we're going to grate the whole lemon. I'm done. So look at this. This is the zest. It's very kind of dark. You don't really have these white skins in there. It's very just the yellow the top of the skin and this is the naked lemon. So now I'm going to cut this in half and take the juice out. I'm done. I've pressed the juice. I filter it. So there's not much pulp. I've removed all of the stone or the seeds and I've got my zest on here and now the sage. The sage, very simple like the parsley. You don't use it with all the branches and stuff like that. You take your sage and you pluck basically the leaves and you tend to use the small ones, the younger shoots. So that's it for the small stuff and this is what you need to have before you start. You've got your sage leaf on here, the lemon juice, the garlic has been bruised. I've smashed it with my hand. You get the zest, the onions here thinly diced and I'm keeping that lemon for after towards the end. And now let's have a quick look at the chicken. The chicken is very important on each side. On the one side you're going to salt and pepper. So season first, okay. Once you're done with the seasoning, something that I do and I want to explain what we're doing is to add a little bit of flour on the chicken. Roll it in the flour slightly. So this is for two things. We do this because it removes the moisture on the chicken so it prevents sticking and also because we've got a sauce it's going to be acting as a like a thickening agent. So a very slight amount of flour, very very slight like this and it's done. So we do all the chicken pieces like this and we're done. Now we've got everything ready we can now start the recipe. I'm using this casserole dish again and this white one. It's got some marks in there the more you cook and I'm going to start here. So olive oil, we're in Corsica. So a good two tablespoon or more of olive oil in there and then slowly I'm going to start to add the chicken. So obviously if you're gluten intolerant, don't add the flour. You can do without. I'm just using it here because so the goal here of course is to sear the meat on all sides and get some brownish color and to have some caramelized juices after the bottom of the pan. That really helps for the flavors and if you want to do like me to avoid sticking, I start on a medium heat and you see and then I let the heat rise slowly and then it doesn't stick that much because if it's too hot from the beginning you will see you put something in immediately it's going to start to stick and it's a nightmare to detach it. While here you start easy and then you raise up the temperature. So we're going to be spending six to seven minutes on this. Up and then you see get a nice color. I'm going to turn everything. Perfect. So you see the coloring. That's the kind of coloring we want. We don't want to go any further than that and I'm repeating the same on the other side. It's been about seven minutes. I'm taking this out and I'm reserving this on the plate on the side. The next step here is optional. If you have a whole chicken, to improve the taste I'm just going to repeat the same. Brown these pieces of carcass, the chicken carcass in here because I'm going to leave them and it's going to be replacing my stock. If you have a stock, a chicken stock you want to use, you don't need to do this. My carcass is browning slowly. I'm going to start with the onion. You may have to reduce the heat here or add a little bit of oil to avoid burning the onion on here. And onions take some time, up to 15 minutes to cook. So here you really, really want to leave this onion to cook before you add the rest of the stuff. As soon as you can see that your juices start to caramelize and a bit too brown, you deglaze with the wine. Don't wait until it's burned. You don't want a dark brown is fine. If you have anything that's black, burning is going to bring an absolute bitter taste in your preparation. You don't want that. So we're raising the heat here. We're going to reduce the wine a little bit. After reducing this for about a minute or something like that, I'm taking my pieces of meat and I put them back. Once the meat is in, I'm going to use the Paul Bocuse technique, which is not to use stock, but use these carcasses to mimic an instant stock making. So this is about half a liter of water. And if you don't have the carcasses, you use the chicken stock instead of water. So I've got this. I'm going to add my zest on here. I'm going to add, of course, my sage. Okay, a bit everywhere in there before we mix it. I'm going to add about a one or two teaspoon of these berries, this pink peppercorn. We're going to have the garlic. So the garlic, I had three cloves, but I like garlic. It's up to you if you want to have something more or less garlicky. And we add the lemon juice. Now we're going to make sure we put everything under there and I'm going to partly cover with a lid and I'm going to leave this to cook. Now remember that the breast, you're going to have to take it out before. So 25 minutes typically for the legs and the breast, you can count 15 minutes. So they've been cooked already for five or six minutes. So within 10 minutes or something like that, we're going to have to take them out. So you mix everything, wait for the boil to come back and recover. The boil or the very light boil is back. So I'm going to reduce my heat. I'm going to see until when it kind of really comes down and I'm going to leave this to cook. So 12 minutes more for the breast and I will take them out and then I will keep on going until I reach a 25 minute mark or 20 minutes with these legs. And so the carcass is going to diffuse the taste of the chicken into the water, same as the chicken. And we're going to have some kind of instant sauce and it's going to reduce as well. So this way you don't want to cover it fully. You want to really just cover it. All right, let's go cover. I've just taken the chicken breast out. In addition here, I've preheated my oven here just like about 50 degrees Celsius to keep things warm, foil and in the oven. The time is up. My legs here are ready. I'm going to take them out and they're going to be joining my chicken breast in the oven while we make the sauce. So for the sauce making, we're going to have to reduce the cooking juices. So the technique we've used here is a bit of a braising technique. We've cooked the chicken first in a liquid. Like this, the chicken is keeping its, it's nice and moist, nice and juicy and it's diffusing some of its taste. Okay, that's the first thing. Now with the taste that we have on here, we can actually create the sauce. The sauce making is always the same process. Now we've got all the flavors in here but they're too diluted. So if you taste now, the sauce is going to be kind of waterish a little bit. So this is what we reduce to concentrate the taste. Then we're going to add some cream, reduce and we're going to have that beautiful sauce because it is always at the end that everything happens with sauce making. Okay, so this is what I'm talking about when you reduce, it's full gun blazes. You want to spend a minimum amount of time. How long do you need to reduce for? Typically you say you reduce by half for a sauce. Now this is the basic benchmark. You can go further but by half is what you have. So you get that much liquid, you want to have, you know, half of that left basically. It's hard to judge but I put my timer on, I will tell you exactly how long it took me. Reducing by half, what does it mean? Look at this, I can see the bottom of my pan when I'm moving around. And now that color was kind of a muddy brown, starts to look like a nice brownish sauce but it's not perfect. So what do we do here? We add the cream of course and that is what's going to transform your sauce. And same thing here, I spent five minutes reducing the sauce before and I just put a few minutes on high heat again because that was a cold cream and boom, we're going to have our sauce ready. So there we have it, within three minutes you should be done. And now it is time for the seasoning, meaning you adjust. So you're going to try the sauce on here, okay, and what you're going to note is that it lacks a little bit of seasoning, pepper if you like, but mostly salt. But remember what I said at the beginning, we're not going to be adding salt because we're going to be using parmesan and there's a trump card because parmesan is very very salty and they always use it there in Corsica. So what I'm doing, I'm adding the salt as an addition of cheese, you see, and that is going to give you something really special. So I've got three or four tablespoons max, something like that, depending on how you like it. It's a personal preference, okay, and that's going to be the final touch. It's a very low heat and I'm going to grab my chicken. So now we're going to have a bit of a cheesy, lemony, sage-like sauce. Okay, see this is where you polish your sauce in there, I love that part. So now it's totally special. Before it was just lemony and stuff, now with the accent of cheese in there, everything comes together. Let me grab the chicken, put it in and we're done. All right, I'm going to use my hand on here. Chicken goes back in there and then all the juices and mix the whole lot. Okay, so what I like to do for the end is to simply baste the chicken here with the sauce. But I think that's it. All that's left to do now is some decoration. So you can put the lid, keep it warm and always when we're ready, I'm going to decorate with some fresh sage leaves, slices of lemon and you're ready to go. And now for the missing piece of the puzzle, you've seen the chicken when it's on the stove, it doesn't look super perfect, but this is always the case. When it's on the stove, you then need to plate or dress in your dish. And a little bit of decoration, as you can see here, and with a few sage leaves, a bit of extra parmesan and I've burned some lemon on here, an extra peppercorn, it looks much better. And you can bring this to the table with a few addition and it looks perfect. And this is the Corsican style inspired lemon chicken with the sage and with the parmesan. The parmesan, I think, was really, really a great addition and the method that we've used to braise gives you something that is actually moist. So you've got a chicken that is not dry. So if I go in there and I cut a piece, I've got this very nice moist chicken. I'm going to just take the one piece to try the sauce. I found it was nice and tangy, a bit of parmesan on here. Yeah. So you really got all the taste of the lemon in front, the sage in second, and then you get the hint of parmesan. And if you bite on one of these peppercorn, it all comes together. And this is really the essence of that dish. It is beautiful, simple. You can serve it as is, as a family dish. But if you want to do the plating style, individual portion, I would pass the sauce before dressing, put this in a little blender, pass through a fine mesh sieve, and then you're going to have all this flavor, you know, dabbled in power. Basically, that's what's going to happen. And a really nice filter sauce with no bits or anything like that. Remember, do not eat the sage leaf. But that's it for me. I will leave you again with that beautiful picture. As always, this is a Corsican-inspired lemon, sage, and parmesan chicken. A beautiful dish that you can put again on your meal rotation. And I will see you all, of course, next time, I think, with another original recipe, because why not? Okay, see you then.