Chicken braised in beer

It was a slightly chilly and very gray, rainy day. I decided to make chicken cooked in beer. Why not? I tried to follow a recipe, but I got sidetracked by my own choice of ingredients and by a memory lapse.

Sauté chicken pieces in a non-stick skillet.
Don't crowd the pan.

I often buy chicken leg-and-thigh sections. I buy them frozen at the local Ed market for a very good price — that's important given the worthless dollar these days. And besides, I've been buying these same chicken parts for a couple of years now and we think they are delicious. The recipe called for a whole chicken.

Transfer the browned pieces to a pan with a lid for braising.

Beer is something I enjoy cooking with more than drinking, actually. A good sweet beer makes a nice tasty sauce, especially when you add onions, herbs, carrots, and mushrooms to the pot. So that's what I did. The recipe didn't call for carrots, but I like them. And it called for fresh mushrooms, which I didn't have. So I used dried mushrooms that I had bought at an Asian supermarket in Paris.

Sauté onions and mushrooms in the same pan.

Add sliced carrots and celery if you want them.

Have I told you how much I like the new stove with its hot gas burners? You can really brown chicken pieces, chops, chunks of meat, or vegetables in short order. And you can control the heat in a way that you can't with electric burners.

Put the chicken pieces and all the vegetables in the
braising pan. Pour on beer, wine, broth, or water.

So here are the steps to making a braised chicken dish. You can use beer, wine (white or red), broth, or just water as the cooking liquid. The first thing to do is to brown the chicken in oil or fat. You can use olive oil, another vegetable oil, butter, or — as I did — duck fat.

Brown the chicken pieces, with the skin on, in a non-stick pan and then transfer it to a stainless steel pan or pot with a lid for the braising part of the recipe. As the chicken finishes browning, add onions, shallots, and herbs — some celery, for example — to the frying pan. Take the chicken pieces out. Put in the mushrooms and carrots to brown a little bit too.

Set the pan on low heat and let it simmer for an hour or two.

When all the aromatics and the chicken are seared and transferred to the lidded pan, pour on the beer, along with some water — including the water that the dried mushrooms were rehydrated in, for example. Put in enough liquid to just cover the chicken and vegetables. Add some salt and pepper too.

Another thing you can add and which my recipe called for is some sautéed lardons or bacon to give some smokiness to the sauce. I was going to use lardons but I forgot to add them. Oh well. Next time. I should have re-read the recipe...

At the end of the cooking, turn up the heat and take
the lid off to let the sauce reduce and thicken.

Then there's nothing left to do. Put a cover on the pan, set it on low heat, and let it simmer for an hour or two. You don't want the chicken to fall apart completely, but you want it to be perfectly tender when the cooking is finished. The onions will cook down into the sauce, and the carrots and mushrooms will be tender.

Serve the braised chicken with rice, potatoes, or noodles.

At the end of the cooking, when you decide it's pretty much done, take the lid off the pan and turn the heat up a little. That way the sauce will boil down and thicken up. You can thicken it with corn or potato starch if you want, but it's not really necessary. Serve with rice, noodles, or boiled potatoes.

I think « Bon appetit ! » is what one says at this point.