The perfect easy chicken recipe to tackle your first French pan sauce.

Welcome back to the channel everyone! So on our last video we've made a starter and this time, as we said last week, we're going to continue and start to make a main. The recipe we're going to be making today is called the chicken bercy. It is a simple sautéed chicken that comes with a sauce from the same name called the sauce bercy. That sauce is one of the quintessential building blocks of sauce making and it is a sauce that is taught to students in the first year at culinary school. Why? Because it outlines the very very basic of the famous sauté deglacé technique which is sauté a piece of meat, deglaze with a bit of wine and shallot, add some stock and have a basic brown sauce. Now the good thing and the reason I want to do that sauce is that because it is a sauce that is extremely versatile. You can make it with beef, you can make it with chicken if you want like here and you can also make it with fish. It's got also a bit of a history. That sauce dates back from the 19th century and legend has it it was invented on the bank on the river Seine in the area of Bercy in Paris. That was the trading port and one of the epicenter of wine trading back then. That sauce, the sauce bercy, was named so because it was a brown sauce known to be made with two little things shallots from the local markets and lots of wine and this is what I've got here. Of course you're going to need a stock. I've got behind me my homestyle demi-glace. Link in the video description and on the screen. It can be made in 30 minutes and if you don't have that you can use a simple pre-made stock from the shop. It will work as well. Let's go. It always fascinates me in french cooking how very simple and rudimentary ingredients can be used to make really something good and here as you can see it's not much. The star of the show is really the shallots. You want lots of shallots at least 50 grams for four chicken thighs here and a little glass of wine maybe 100 ml you know 150 ml if you want. We're going to reduce it anyway and some stock. So this is the homestyle demi-glace I'm talking about. What is it? It is simply a store-bought stock, a veal stock that I've enhanced in flavor by cooking it with a mix of aromatics and chicken wings that I've chopped up and browned so you get more color and more flavor and this is kind of the result but still we're going to have to reduce this even more because that sauce is an instant sauce. That means once the the chicken is ready and has been sautéed, it's colored, it's cooked, we're going to have to make the sauce but really really quick. We're not going to spend too much time reducing the whole lot so time is always of the essence. And now let's begin the recipe. Of course before you start make sure you've measured your wine, you've thinly chopped your shallots, you've chopped as well a tablespoon worth of parsley and you have your stock ready. We're going to be cooking here the chicken in a saute pan in a tablespoon of oil with about 20 grams of butter. It's a bit the Escoffier style on here and we're going to use a you know a medium heat because we don't want to burn the butter on here and we're going to take it easy to color the chicken. So I'm just going to wait for my pan to come to temperature here and then we're going to put the chicken thighs skin side down. Now butter tends to burn at very high temperature but it can still take quite some heat as you can see here even if you start on a medium high you're still fine but I always prefer to really start easy and let these thighs cook slowly and color slowly rather than starting in a very raging heat and try to burn everything. You know and we've got 20 to 25 minutes so there's no rush at all. Make sure it's seasoned, salt and pepper. Okay and I'm going to start by leaving this for a good you know 5 even 10 minutes slowly on this side until it is colored and in the meantime we're going to be taking care of the stock. And now for the stock so I've got about 400 ml of my homestyle demi-glace. It's already tasty, it's got that nice color but I want to reduce it as much as I can. So I'm going to reduce it by half so that I'm left with about 200 ml and that is going to really save a lot of time when my chicken is ready because as soon as the chicken is ready I'm going to pour that reduced stock and the reducing time that I'm going to have to make my sauce it's going to be kept to a minimum and it also concentrates the flavor. If you have a store-bought stock you may want to prefer starting perhaps with like two cups you know something like this half liter and reduce this by half or even to 200 ml because it can get hard sometimes to really get these flavors going with store-bought stock. But so now back to the chicken. It's been cooking gently and let's have a look. It's been a look at this almost a good almost a good 10 minutes in there. Look at the colors. See very slowly it's getting a nice coloring. I'm going to turn it and if your chicken renders too much fat from the skin, mine was quite fatty, use a spoon and remove the excess. Always be in control. Don't leave too much fat in there. You want some but you know you don't want like too much of it or it's going to start to boil and almost like a deep frying effect. Another thing that can be done as well to make sure it cooks properly you can use a lid. You don't want to cover the whole thing totally but you can kind of loosely cover it like this to keep the heat in there. Okay but make sure there's not too much you know water vapor that forms and goes into the pan. My stock is now ready. It has reduced but one of the problem you can encounter a lot of time with stock even from the shop is that they're going to be still very liquid. In the professional world you have to use what's called a thickened stock. So what we're going to do here we're going to thicken it with about one and a half tablespoon of arrowroot which is a bit like cornstarch. We've diluted with a tiny bit of water. Okay so I'm mixing both of these together. I'm going to use a spoon and all what you do is to mix that together and you get a kind of a white paste. The problem with this which is a bit like cornstarch that you will see it's a nice method to thicken sauces but why it sends the sauce. Look at the color you see it's a very whitish kind of color but that's the bit of the drawback but it really will help you to thicken it to get that consistency of a sauce. So I'm mixing it like that and I'm going to put this back in my pan warm it up a little bit and we're going to have the stock done. So I'm back on the stove and look at what I've got now. What was really liquid now I've got a kind of a semi syrupy consistency which is perfect and what you want when you make this kind of sauces. So when we saw thickened sauce it is usually that kind of consistency you see it's almost syrupy and it's got that spoon coating power just a touch but it's just enough. So you don't want to go any further than that because we're going to thicken the sauce afterwards in the pan. So I can turn my heat off here and all what we need to wait now for the chicken to be ready. Look at these lovely colors my chicken is now ready it's been a bit more than 25 minutes make sure you've got an internal temperature of at least 75 or something like that can reduce your heat. I'm going to reserve this into a plate I'm going to keep it warm covered in foil in the oven at 50 degrees celsius while we make the sauce. And now the chicken is resting is in the oven we've got a good 10 minutes we can do the sauce. So this brown stuff is what you want this is the the golden the goal that you want that is quite some fat in there. Usually you'll get rid of the excess of fat but here we've got a lot of shallots to work with so I'm going to go to a medium heat I don't want to burn too much or anything and I'm going to take plenty of shallots in here reduce my heat because we're going to want to use this fat to cook the shallots in there you see and very quickly they will absorb and start to cook so if it's too dry you're going to have a problem really to you know to cook this shallot and we're going to spend a good three minutes or more and wait until the shallots are cooked. Now shallots cook very quickly compared to onions okay and but it's important that you wait until they are cooked because once you add the wine they will absolutely stop cooking. Now the most important here is not to burn the shallots you don't want that so you want to reduce your heat as much as you can while this is cooking and you can raise your heat after when we're going to do the famous deglazing. So sauté is what we've done with the meat okay we're adding the shallots and now we're going to be ready for the deglacé which is the deglazing this is where we're going to detach all the caramelized juices from the pan that's good enough my shallots are cooked now I'm going to raise my heat and get ready to pour that wine in okay so just want to raise the heat a little bit just I'm going to put it on really high and you can see what's going to happen here you can see it starts to sizzle a bit more and I'm not going to wait too long and pour the wine in. If you want you can put more and what we're going to do here is to use that big quantity of wine to detach what we call it the les sucs de cuisson in French it is all these caramelized juices so you want to slowly scrap don't don't force it too much and let it go let it boil just a minute or two max. So I've been scraping and swirling my pan over and look how clean the pan is now it was full of brown bits and now it's absolutely clean this sauce by the way is one of the very rare sauce where you can actually leave two or three tablespoon of wine behind so you can see the amount of liquid that I've got here it's quite a lot so this is the wine with the shallot and you've got that nice concoction and you really want to start to thicken a little bit but you don't want to get it totally dry you want to keep some of that juices and from here absolutely easy all what you're going to do is to add the rest of your sauce and then same thing bring to the boil and this is when I told you that time is of the essence if we did not reduce our stock and we had imagine half a liter of stock in there you'll be standing in front of your pan for 15 minutes so here all what we need to do is bring this to a little boil reduce a tiny bit for just a few minutes and that's going to be it we're going to be done after a few minutes there you have it this is the ancestor of all brown sauce the bare bone sauce the basic brown sauce with shallot called the sauce bercy I can turn my heat off and you got two options here you can go the rustic way which is just using the sauce as is with the shallot and pour it over your meat or you can filter the sauce to get rid of the shallot if for instance you think the shallot did not cook properly that's an easy way out you can pass this through a sieve and have the sauce with the taste the shallots but without the shallot but it's one final step of course that we always do in french cooking and that is called monté la sauce au beurre we need a little bit of butter and all it is when the heat is off you put 10 or 20 gram of butter and you're going to slowly swirl your pan and let the butter melt and that action really tends to give a gloss to your sauce and also a nice taste and that buttery taste is made out of cream butter and we're done look at this we went from that kind of brownish color to now a more chestnut-y color with a shine and a gloss and look at that sauce it's very rudimentary but it's time to taste the butter absolutely add something shallots are cooked it's great and I like the acidity that you still have in there some people add a little bit of lemon juice if you want it more acidic and it's time for the seasoning I think the salt is all right but what I will add is a little bit of freshly ground black pepper in there okay never use a whisk by the way when you finish a sauce otherwise it can whiten the sauce always a spoon or just swirl into the pan and that's about it we're done we're ready to serve now remember this dish is a very rudimentary dish it was something it was served in small eateries on the go you would have the meat like this and you'll be served that sauce that you've created so all what you need to do you can serve it on the sides but the the true form is really to have these shallots flowing over your chicken in here and you want a good dollop of sauce and it is a very simple but well executed brown sauce you see and a little bit of parsley on top and without excess just seals the deal and then we have it with better angle this is the chicken a la bercy a sauté chicken served with the sauce bercy and I think this sauce is actually very very important because it is the number one sauce you want to master I have to have this sauté deglacé technique under your belt so you'll be learning of really getting this nice color of your meat you have the the caramelized juices you can make your own stock use some wine and you go from this gesture of you know cooking your meat adding your wine waiting for it to reduce get the right texture that syrupy consistency thicken your sauce add your stock and at the end you got a beautiful tangy brown sauce well balanced well seasoned and if you want a bit more tanginess with a bit of lemon and it is beautiful on chicken I've tasted it again it is great so I will leave you with this picture as always please have a go at making that sauce and tell me what you think in the comment section as for me as I said I will see you then next time for a dessert and we'll complete our first rotation of starter main and dessert I'll see you then