Poulet fumé et choucroute

One of the nice products we get here is whole chickens that are smoked and sold fully cooked. The wood used for the smoking is beechwood.

You can eat the smoked chickens cold or you can heat them up one way or another. The directions on the package say to put the whole chicken, unwrapped, in the microwave for three minutes. That doesn't sound very good to me, but putting the whole chicken in a 300ºF oven for 15 or 20 minutes works pretty well.

Poulet fumé au bois de hêtre

Another thing to do is to cut the chicken in half and heat up one half for now, saving the other for later. Luckily, a friend recently sent us a big serrated knife that is just perfect for the job. Thanks, Peter.

Nice knife for cutting a cooked chicken
in half, right through the bones

Smoked chicken would be good with many side dishes, but the one that comes to mind right now is sauerkraut. That's because this is really the choucroute season. I'm not sure if you ever think of eating sauerkraut as a vegetable, but according to the books I read it is very digestible and nutritious. That's my experience too. And it can be delicious, fixed right.

The package from the grocery store

Sauerkraut is shredded cabbage that has been salted and left to marinate and ferment in brine. The salt draws a lot of moisture out of the cabbage leaves, and then the sauerkraut can benefit from long cooking. In France it is usually cooked in white wine. It's mild and slightly sweet when you eat it. I've written about preparing and cooking it before, here, here and here.

Sauerkraut cooked with smoked bacon, onions,
carrots, white wine, and spices

Usually the sauerkraut is cooked with some smoked pork lardons, onions, and sliced carrots, and that's the way I like it. It's seasoned with black pepper, cloves or allspice, bay leaves, and juniper berries. The sauerkraut I bought was labeled as having already been cooked in wine, but I wish I had rinsed it well in cold water and then re-seasoned it myself. It was slightly more sour than I like. Usually, I buy raw sauerkraut, but it seems to be harder and harder to find nowadays. Everybody wants everything pre-cooked.

The other standard accompaniment to sauerkraut is little boiled potatoes. Just boil them whole, in their skins.

I started enjoying sauerkraut when I taught English in Metz,
in the Lorraine province, thirty years ago.

The smoked chicken is a great substitute for the meats that choucroute are usually served with, or for some of them at least. Instead of a big piece of smoked or brined pork, serve the chicken. You can always add a pork sausage or two to dress it up. The sausages served with sauerkraut are usually smoked or fresh pork sausages (like mild Italian sausages, for example) and frankfurters (known also as saucisses de Strasbourg in France).

I was just looking around on the Safeway web site and I see that they sell smoked chicken breast for $9.00/lb., at least in California. Zut alors ! The smoked chicken I bought, a whole chicken, was 3.89 €/kg. That would come out to 1.77 €/lb., and that's $2.65/lb even with the lousy U.S. dollar exchange rate right now. What a bargain!