Chicken Potato Stew

Today we're gonna make a delicious hearty chicken stew. It is so easy to make and perfect for fall and winter. Let's go over the ingredients really quick. So this is three pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs. I just cut those chicken thighs into two to three pieces. So if it was a very large one, I cut it basically into three pieces. The smaller ones, two pieces. These are gonna break down during the stew cooking process and they're gonna get very tender and a lot of them will fall apart. I have one and a quarter pound of Yukon gold potatoes. The smaller ones I just halved. So like something like that, I just cut in half. And then maybe the larger ones you can quarter if you want. If you have really big Yukon golds, just cut them into basically one and a half to two inch chunks. We have olive oil that's gonna sear our chicken thighs. And by the way, the chicken thighs, you can salt and pepper overnight. We're gonna season them now. But if you do that overnight, the salt will penetrate it better and it will be even better. Aromatics, we have about, I have way too much time here, but we're gonna use about, I would say go from four to 10 sprigs at a time, depending on how much time you like. I'll probably throw in maybe like eight to start. Two bay leaves, large bay leaves. Quarter cup of flour, that's gonna be to thicken our stew. And then we have one large onion. So I just cut these into fairly large pieces like this, kind of like a rough chop. I have one pound of carrots. The larger pieces of carrots, like the thicker pieces of carrots, I kind of cut into maybe one inch length. And then the thinner sides, maybe two inch. Okay, I peeled them, but you don't have to peel carrots if you don't want to. Two to three ribs of celery that are diced. One cup of peas, they'll go in towards the end. If you don't like peas, you can easily omit them in this recipe. Five cloves of garlic that's minced. One cup of dry white wine. Three cups of low sodium chicken stock. I'm using Better Than Bouillon that I just reconstituted. If you have a homemade stock, that would be even better. Two teaspoons Worcestershire sauce. Three tablespoons of unsalted butter. That's gonna add more fat when we make like a little bit of a roux. If it's not thick enough at the end, I'll show you how to do it. There's a couple ways you can go about it, but I think with the liquid proportions that we have, we're gonna be totally fine. All right, let's start searing that chicken. All right, so we're gonna season this chicken with salt and pepper. So use a good amount. We have three pounds of chicken thighs here. So if you keep it to about 0.75 to 1.25 sodium level, they're gonna be well salted. Again, you can do this overnight if you want. And what would that be? So we have about 1,400 grams of chicken thighs. So that would be 14 grams of salt if you want it at the 1% level. Or you could just do like me and just kind of rough estimate. All right, I'm just gonna turn these over and I'll salt and pepper the other side. Okay, so I have a five quart brazier. So this is fairly low, but it's wide, which I like. If you have an even wider brazier, you might be able to do all the chicken at one time, but this will probably take us two, possibly three batches. I'm gonna turn this to about a little bit higher than medium heat. We wanna get a nice sear on the chicken, get a lot of flavor out of the chicken. So now I know you're probably thinking, can I use chicken breasts? The answer is yes, but chicken breasts are gonna tend to dry out over the long braise time. So if you do that, I would probably sear your chicken breasts off so you get some flavor in this pan and then hold adding them back probably to the last 30 minutes or so of your stew. Can you use rotisserie chicken here? The answer is yes too, but you're not really gonna be able to extract any flavor from the chicken. So I would go with chicken boneless, skinless chicken thighs. They're absolutely the best for a dish like this. They're super versatile. They're actually better than, you know, a lot of times store-bought chicken breasts now are woody. And, you know, I would imagine you've encountered it before. I've encountered it many times. It doesn't matter the brand. So, you know, recipe says three tablespoons of olive oil here but just get enough on the bottom. There's gonna be a good amount of chicken fat. So we don't need a ton of fat here. I'm gonna let this get very hot before we start searing our chicken. And you don't have to use olive oil. You could use any type of oil you want. You could use just avocado oil. You could use lard, which would be even better. You can just use any type of fat that's gonna allow you to sear your chicken. All right, so our oil is hot. It's kind of smoking. It'll be shimmering when you go like this. All right, it's what we want. Once we put the chicken in, it's gonna lower the heat dramatically. Now, you don't really want to crowd it too much but they're gonna shrink a good amount. So you'll be all right if you kind of stuff them in there but the further apart they are, the better sear you're gonna get. I'm trying to manage here so I can do it in two batches. I don't have to be here for three. That's part of the reason why I like a wide brazier like this instead of a Dutch oven. Even a bigger Dutch oven will have a narrower bottom. You could just do all your searing in another like 14 inch pan and you can add everything into your pot later on if you want to. All right, I think we'll be able to do this in two batches because I know if you're like me, you want good food but you don't want to spend seven hours making it. I mean, I totally get it. The best thing about this dish is that it's even better the next day. So if you make a huge pot of it, say it's just you, you live in by yourself, you can follow this whole recipe. You'll have a good amount of food for the whole entire week. All right, so I just have a screen over my pot and we're gonna let it brown a good amount on each side. Timing, four to six minutes per side. Don't worry about the timing, just make sure you get some good color on there. All right, so splashing all over the place, so I have this and let's just check that the chicken is brown enough. Okay, so that's what we want. If you heat up your pan properly, get the oil hot enough, you're probably not gonna have much sticking. I will tell you on a pan like this, you will have sometimes have sticking. It's not sticking here now because I'm the best cook in the world but it might happen to you. Oh, see, I got some sticking there a little bit. I guess you're not the best cook in the world. Yeah, a little sticking over there. So look, because I'm cooking on a portable burner, my center's gonna have a little bit more brown pieces versus the sides aren't. So I'll move them in there. Yeah, they're sticking a little bit. So not the best cook in the world. All right, but the chicken's looking great. All right, we'll heat up the other side for about the same amount of time. What we're gonna do, I'm gonna cook the next batch after this. Let's just put everything in something like this, a plate, whatever. We're gonna keep all the chicken over on the side tented with foil. There'll be a lot of juices from it. All right, so we're gonna do the second batch and it'll all fit on the second batch. Three pounds of chicken in this five-quart freezer, Crock-Pot brand. I'll link it. It's not expensive if you wanna buy this one. Just get something like it and you'll be able to fit all the liquid, everything that we have for this recipe in here. Use a larger Dutch oven, you'll be totally fine too. You can even use a heavy pot to do the whole recipe. So all the chicken's out. We have a nice browned bottom of our pot. I'm gonna put in all those onions. I turned the heat down to a touch less than medium because we don't wanna put too much color on these. And then also the celery. So that's two to three ribs. Why do I say two to three? Sometimes you buy celery, it's like a very thin rib. Sometimes it's larger. You could say, Jim, why don't you tell me the weight of it? Okay, I don't know. Maybe like a little less than a half a pound of celery. You don't have to be precise with any of this stuff. You want more celery, add more celery. You want more onion, add more onion. I'm putting a little bit of salt in here because that's going to take some of the water out of them. That's gonna allow us to clean our pot right now. See the bottom here, how it's dark? That salt's gonna draw all the moisture out of these vegetables. We're also gonna add three tablespoons of butter into the mix. Say your pot is darker than this. Okay, see how that looks right there? Trying to make some space so you can see it. If your pot's darker than that, all you can do is just take a touch of water, a tablespoon. Okay, just put it there. And then you can just kind of clean your pot with your flat edge of your spoon. And it might need a touch more. But if you do that, it's gonna take longer before your vegetables are gonna start to saute. All right, we're gonna let these saute for about 10 minutes or so till they get very soft. That beep you just heard is my oven. Set your oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. We're gonna cook this whole chicken stew in the oven. Now, if you don't wanna use your oven, though you should because you're gonna be making a stew probably in fall and winter, but if you don't wanna use your oven, you can do it all on the stovetop. The only reason I don't like to do these type of stews and even a pot of sauce I'll do in the oven too is just simply, you have to be in the room a little bit more to be feeling the bottom so nothing's burning. That's the main reason. If you put it in the oven, it's really just set and forget it. Jim, a lot of people ask questions about crockpots. What do you think of a crockpot for this particular? This whole entire recipe could be done in a crockpot. So crockpots, I don't have one. I don't wanna be insulting to crockpot users, but I like real cooking tools and I prefer to have more control myself. But a crockpot has a sear setting, I believe, I believe. And you would just do the recipe the exact same way. And then after this process, you would put everything back in and then you would just set it, I would say probably to, I would say low to medium low because we're gonna cook it in the oven at 325 degrees Fahrenheit. So you just need the equivalent on the crockpot and then you're just gonna cook it until everything's tender. So yeah, that's a very easy way to do it. You could probably put it all the way on the lowest setting on the crockpot, go to work, come back, and then your chicken stew would be waiting for you. So yeah, totally fine. I just don't own a crockpot. I do have an Instapot that I just cook rice in. That's the only thing I use it for. But I just like traditional cooking, pots, pans, stuff like that, without being fancy, I guess is the right thing, right way to describe it. All right, so these are gonna just saute. We wanna get them nice and soft. Okay, so that's been about 10 minutes on those vegetables. So like I said, just get them soft. Don't put much color on them. So just like regulate your heat. And if you were burning, say, you can remove your pot from the heat or just add a touch of water, wine, whatever you want. Okay, this is that garlic, about five cloves, four or five cloves minced. All right, we're gonna stir it in here and let it cook for a couple minutes until it gets very fragrant. All right, that's smelling really good. This is the flour. This is four tablespoons or 34 grams. Okay, about a quarter cup worth. And let's just cook this around until no white spots appear, about a minute. This is gonna help thicken our stew. If you can't use flour, what you can do, a couple things. You can smash some of the potatoes. You can even put them in a blender, puree them and some of the carrot and that'll thicken up your sauce. You can also use some instant mashed potatoes or potato starch and that will easily thicken it up. Or you can use cornstarch at the end to thicken it up. So then you have a lot of choices if you don't wanna use flour. But with the liquid proportions we have, we're probably not gonna really need to thicken it much at the end. All right, that's perfect. That's all I want. So this is one cup of dry white wine. Just turn the heat to high and just let it cook for 20, 30 seconds and just take your flat edge of your wooden spoon and just remove all the bottom. You'll have a chance to do this again in a second when we add the stock in. Okay, that's it because it's gonna turn into this very thick paste very quickly. Whisk in the three cups of stock. This is chicken stock. You're not gonna clump here. The only way you would clump is if your chicken stock was like piping hot, like really hot. This is all gonna combine. We're gonna let this come to a boil and we can also add the chicken in at the same time. Okay, add the chicken and all those residual juices that are in the pan. There's a lot of them. That beautiful chicken is going to break down as we stew this, as we braise it. All right, so that's boiling. Okay, just take your spoon. Feel anything at the bottom, just remove it. It's very smooth now, the bottom of the pot. We're gonna add all those carrots in. So that's one pound of carrots, one and a quarter pound of potatoes, Yukon Golds I'm using. This is two teaspoons of Worcestershire sauce, two bay leaves, and about eight or so sprigs of thyme. I like this thyme that I'm growing here. You'll see thyme in the store. It'll also, it'll have very woody stems, but this is very thin, so this is, they're edible. So you don't have to really worry about, if you have like the thicker, stronger thyme, you can just wrap that up in like a cheesecloth or something and just, or tie it and just remove the whole entire thing at the end. But for this, you don't really have to worry about it. Just get everything in there, just everything, try to get everything submerged as much as you can. Gonna turn off the heat, going to cover the pot. Gonna just wipe down the edges for any fat. And then I'm gonna put this in the oven for 45 minutes. We're gonna cook it covered for 45 minutes. Then at that point, we'll uncover it and we'll finish up the dish. Smells so good already. Okay, that's 45 minutes roughly. So we'll move everything around, but it's all perfect. See, no sticking when you do it in the oven like that. You don't have to worry about anything. So chicken thighs are great because you can get them, basically it's very hard to overcook for a stew like this. They're great for a lot of other recipes, very forgiving. And the longer you cook this, they're gonna start to shred. It's just really about balancing that thyme with the potatoes and the carrots. We'll check the potatoes and the carrots and they're gonna be tender pretty much, close to it already, maybe a little bit more on the potatoes but what we're gonna do now is we're gonna cook this for another, I would say another 45 minutes to 60 minutes in the oven uncovered. And what that's gonna do, it's gonna concentrate all the liquid here. So it's just a perfect way to do a soup or stew like this. If you like soups and stews, we have plenty of soups and stews in our cookbook. Our cookbook is right over there. A lot of soups and stews are basically the same technique. It's really just about adding the right flavors you like. You can buy the cookbook here, here. If you bought it already, we really appreciate it. We thank you. We're gonna make a big push with the cookbook one more time into the end of this year, I would say. And then after that, maybe it'll be a second book. We're not sure yet. If you bought it, thank you. We appreciate it. That's how it looks. All right, so if you're working with frozen peas, give it a little bit more time. You put them in maybe 15 minutes before. These are defrosted now because I prepped my ingredients overnight. We still have a good amount of liquid in here so we might have to thicken it just a touch but it's not a big deal if you have to. I didn't really go into herbs. I'm using thyme here. If you want to use sage, you can too. Rosemary would be great too. You put sage in, a few other herbs, you're really making almost like a chicken pot pie stew. So that's one cup of peas. If you don't like peas, just take them out. There's a lot of people, a lot of comments are always like, I don't like peas. So I made a roast compollo maybe a couple of weeks ago and there were people saying they hate the peas. So just take them out. These recipes are super flexible. All recipes are. All right, so I put the peas in. I'm just gonna throw it back in the oven for another 10 minutes or so. And then if we need to thicken this, which I think we'll just do it a touch, it's super easy. Ooh, just got blasted by the heat there. Make sure you keep your head back when you open up the oven. That's looking good. Chicken is starting to shred. So if you just take your, see how I'm just taking my spoon right there and it's all shredding apart. Now, if you want it, you can shred it easily at this point. You can cook it for a little bit longer if you want. I would just do it to the point where your potatoes and peas aren't falling apart but that they're tender. So total cooking time here was about an hour and 30 minutes in the oven. We'll check those potatoes and carrots. See, they're nice and tender, but they're still holding their shape, okay? That's what we want. So they look great here. Everything looks great here. Tara, you can see the consistency of this too. So I think we go a little bit thicker here. What do you think? I like it a little thicker. Little bit thicker. So it's very easy to do this. I'll show you right now. So what you can do is if your potatoes and carrots aren't super tender, you can just reduce this liquid like this for about five or 10 minutes and that might thicken it up enough for you. But if you want to do it the easy way, and you can judge by how much, how thick it is. I can tell, I can eyeball it right here. I'm not going to need quite a tablespoon of cornstarch. So I mixed up two teaspoons with just about an ounce of water. And I'm just going to drizzle that in there. And this is going to thicken up in a matter of seconds. Now, cornstarch has about double the thickening power of flour. So it will thicken quickly. And guess what? If you don't use enough, just use a little bit more. Just go with another teaspoon or so. Just needs a little bit of heat to activate it. I would say that's pretty good right now. You can see all that chicken breaking apart as I move it. All right, I'm going to turn off the heat. You can leave the bay leaves in for like, for a nice look if you want, but I would just remove them because people aren't going to want to eat them. And now we'll look at this, Tara. This is the new consistency here. Oh yeah, that looks better. Okay. If you want it thicker than that, just use a little bit more. That is it. But this is great. This is ready to go. All we're going to do right here is we're going to taste for salt and pepper. And I'm not even going to really worry about the vegetables or the chicken because they are all tender. That is so good. I'm going to add a little bit more pepper in here. And just a touch of salt. Maybe like a half a teaspoon of diamond crystal kosher salt. All right. There you go. Super hearty chicken stew that is very easy to make. I'm going to bring down the taste tester in a little while. See what he thinks. All right, James. This is my classic chicken stew. I know you're not familiar with this dish. I know you never had it before. Well, I mean- I know. I'm joking. I made this one a week ago. Everybody loved it. So I'm like, you know what? Let me make it again. My take on this dish, I think it's just a better version of chicken noodle soup. First of all, I like chicken noodle soup, but I just think this is better because it's not super brothy, which I think is better when it comes to chicken. You replace the noodles, obviously, with potatoes. But besides that, everything else is the same. I guess there's not peas in chicken noodle soup. I would compare more to chicken pot pie filling. Well, yeah, it is like chicken pot pie, but yeah, I didn't even think of that. I held back on the sage, which is normally almost always an ingredient in pot pies. What am I tasting, though? Thyme. What do you think about the peas in it? I think it adds something that it definitely needs. Yeah, it's like a texture crunch. Yeah, a little bit. I know there's celery in here, but not a lot. Everything else is soft, you know? Yeah, peas going at the end, that's why. Oh yeah, I really like this dish. I'm gonna give this one a nine out of 10. All right, I will take it. Yeah, still very good, obviously. What do you think of the way the house smells when you're making something like this? I mean, yeah, I immediately knew that you made chicken, you know? It just smells like chicken. Yeah. It smells good. It smells like comfort, like the fall almost. Yeah, it smells like fall, yeah. Like Christmas, even. I don't really have much else. All right, well, I think people appreciate those quick, concise reviews. We appreciate you watching every week. We'll be back next week for another one. Thanks.