Cooking (probably) The Best Chicken Dish in the World

Today we're gonna make 40 clove garlic chicken. This one is super easy and so delicious. So let's go over the ingredients quickly. I have eight, well, I have nine chicken thighs, but eight would be fine for four people. You can certainly increase that if you want to go up to 12. You can even double this whole entire recipe. We're going to season these chicken thighs, and I just left them in the fridge overnight to dry them out a little bit, but we're gonna season them with salt and pepper, and then we're gonna sear them in butter and olive oil. That's the first step of the recipe. Then we're gonna make a simple sauce that consists of 40 cloves of garlic. Okay, I probably have 50 here. Don't be afraid of all this garlic. It's gonna be slow-roasted and very mellow. You want to serve this dish with crusty bread, so when you're getting that remaining drippings in the pan, which you won't have that much, even after all this liquid goes in, you can spread the garlic on the bread. Flavors are incredible. And for that liquid component, we have 3 1⁄4 cup of dry vermouth, and then 1 1⁄2 cups of no-sodium chicken stock. It's my oven just beeping right now. You can even set your oven for 375 degrees Fahrenheit at this time, because everything goes quite quickly. But yeah, 1 1⁄2 cups of no-sodium chicken stock. I have tarragon, and I have parsley. So tarragon is a delicious herb. I love it. We use it in some other French dishes. We make a nice French vinaigrette with it. I suggest you test a piece to see if you like it. And if you don't, just use all parsley for garnish at the end. But we're going to use about one tablespoon, maybe a touch more. Say you don't want to do that, you can also use herbs de Provence during the roasting process, or you can put it on initially on the chicken. We just use that in chicken Provencal. This recipe is such an easy recipe. It shows where you can make something where you don't even really need to have good technique, and it's going to come out great. We're going to sear these chicken pieces first, but even if I didn't do that, and we just threw everything in the oven, it would probably come out great too. But I'm going to show you just how to get a little bit more flavor by searing a chicken, which we're going to do now. For all these recipes with chicken thighs, I always say, make sure they're trimmed up. And I trimmed up eight of them. I stuck these in the fridge overnight just to dry them out. You can also salt them overnight too. If you do that, then you're not going to put any salt on them at the point that I'm doing, searing them. But I left one that hasn't been trimmed. And this is how they always come when you buy them. No matter what brand you get in the store, you know, they'll be wetter because they'll be coming right out of the bag, but you'll always have like a massive amount of overhanging fat like this. So I would just trim this. You can save this part here for something else, but for this dish, we want to just be able to get an equal sear on both sides. And you know, this is done by machine, but they do this so they can sell you more fat and skin and make more money. So I just like to trim it up. And yeah, if you save these parts of the chicken skin, if you fry them up, they're delicious, okay? So you can do something with them. You don't have to throw it out. You could also just save all this, stick it in with chicken parts. Say you were breaking down a chicken and you saved the backbone, stick it all together. You can make a stock with it if you like. But the bones are more important when you're making a stock. 14 inch pan I'm going to use so I can do this all in one batch. And this pan will be able to go in the oven to finish it. Just use any oven safe pan. 14 inch is going to make it easier, but you can do this in two batches if you like. And then you can put everything in a baking dish or a larger baking pan for the roasting process, especially if you do more than nine chicken thighs. All right, so when we use a stainless steel pan, we're going to always preheat it. I'm heating it to roughly medium and we're going to let it heat for about three minutes. While that's heating, we're going to season our chicken. Okay, so just salt liberally on both sides. We're going to do salt and pepper on both sides. So if you like main course recipes, which I'm sure you do because you're watching this video, I want to let you know about our new cookbook, Sip and Feast Family Favorites. It has plenty of main courses in there. In addition to that, it has all the other sections you would expect to find in a cookbook. It is a beautiful cookbook, 256 pages, over 100 recipes, beautiful photo, nice instructions, good story in every single recipe. It has U.S. customary and metric measurements. So everybody will be able to follow along with these easy recipes. Right above you is the link where you can buy it. You can get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all other sellers. QR code if you're watching on TV, which I'm increasingly aware that the majority of you are watching on TV. It's also pinned in the comments and in the description. If you don't like cookbooks, you just like watching our videos, buy it for a friend or family who does. Thanks. I'm just sad about medium, it's heated up for a while. I'm going to put some olive oil down in the pan. You don't have to put too much. That's kind of smoking, but the chicken will cool down in the pan once we get it in. All right, so just skin side down. Hopefully I can fit them all. I know I can. You don't really want to overcrowd it, but at the same time, if you have like one extra thigh, you're going to wait another batch? Probably not. You can see even initially, because the pan's heated up properly, I can move them. Versus like, if you just didn't do this, everything would be sticking and it would stick the whole time. Why do you need to heat it? So the chemistry behind it is the metal, essentially when it gets heat at a certain temperature, it closes the pores in the metal. The pores is what the oil will and everything will go into and stick. That being said, if you're doing like frying, say you're frying chicken collards and you're pouring a half an inch of oil in here, you can do that right from the beginning. It's all right. It's just when you're pan searing in a pan, you have to heat the pan up. A stainless pan. It doesn't matter for a non-stick, but you want to get your pan relatively hot before you add your protein anyway. So we're just going to leave it like this untouched and let them get nice and golden brown for, I don't know, maybe five minutes, six minutes, but we're going to go by looks. We're going to look at it. If they don't get brown enough at that point, we'll keep doing it. It's fine. So I like to let it go over just maybe like a minute initially to start. It was like a squeak. Then I'll put the butter in. So the recipe says one tablespoon. I'm going to add two tablespoons. It's fine. All right. Stick it in there. Normally, if you like put the butter down right away, it'll start to burn, but to get the oil in first, just add the butter in a little bit later. It's better that way. Or you could use ghee, clarified butter, and then you don't have to worry about that. But butter browns better. Browns chicken better. Okay, so that's been about six minutes. We'll check them. See, that's looking beautiful, that one. I'll move that one over to the edge. The ones on the outside probably won't be quite as brown. Like that one could use a little bit more. So I'll do that. I'll take this one from the center and move it over. But yeah, if you heat up your pan properly, these things are just going to skate on the pan. They're not going to stick at all. I always talk about this because so many people, they can't cook on stainless. They're like, I hate it. You know, we get a lot of emails too from people saying like, you know, thank you for showing me how to heat up a stainless pan. A lot of people just use their trusty nonstick for everything and it's really not the proper tool for most things to cook. All right, I'm going to give it like two more minutes on this side. Okay, so now we're going to flip them over and do them for about five minutes on the other side. All right, so we're just going to remove these to a plate. Okay, and I have all that oil, butter, and a little bit of the chicken fat in there. So I'm going to put all the garlic cloves in now. I'm going to turn the heat down to about medium low. I just want to get these started in the pan. I'll just set the chicken off to the side. Let these go for about five minutes until they get golden. Little golden. It won't get much, but let's see. How many do I have here? I only have 34. Whoa, you need more. Uh-oh. You thought you had 50. I thought I had more. I knew that was a gross underestimate. I'm going to go get some more. All right, so I added some more cloves in there. Had to peel a few quickly, which is not the easiest thing, you know? That's probably the hardest thing in this recipe is peeling all these cloves. By the way, I don't know if I said in the beginning, this recipe is from James Beard. He made it for Julia Child. The official recipe's online. Obviously, I changed it to make it better because he wishes he could be as good a cook as I am, but I believe he poured off a lot of the fat from here at this point. I don't think you need to do that, but you could if you want. I use that fat to do the cloves right now. Three quarter cup dry vermouth. Get your head back. One and a half cups no sodium chicken stock. You can use low sodium, but there's a lot of brands now, and I'm turning this to high. There are a lot of brands that sell no sodium chicken stock in a box. If you use Better Than Bouillon chicken base, which has more flavor, they don't make a no sodium one, which would probably make it have a lot less flavor. They do a reduced sodium, but it is quite salty, and we're going to reduce this by half right now, and then we're going to roast it in the oven for an hour. We're going to basically concentrate this liquid. You know, if you're starting with something salty, definitely don't start with a full salt chicken stock. Chicken stock should never have any salt to begin with, so it's silly that all these brands sell chicken stock with salt in it, you know, but I digress. Anyway, don't start with a salted, like a heavily salted version. Or make your own stock. We got a recipe on our site for making stocks. Chicken stock, beef stock, all that. Easiest type of stock to make is a seafood or shrimp stock, because it only takes like 20 minutes, but you know, chicken and beef take longer. I love a shrimp stock. You made shrimp stock a few times, and every time you do, it just smells out of this world. I save all the shells from the shrimp that I get, and I got shells from like seven or 10 pounds of shrimp. I just keep adding them to a couple Ziploc bags, and when you make a seafood dish, if you can do that, like say you're doing like a shrimp pasta, if you can add up like a cup of that shrimp stock in there, it will make it so much better than adding just pasta water or something like that, or chicken stock. All right, so we're coming to a boil. Just take the flat edge of your wooden spoon, and just scrape the bottom of the pan to dislodge all the brown bits. And I want to reduce this by about half. You know, it's hard to tell with something like this. So you can take a toothpick, and as long as your pan is completely level, which mine is now, because I have these little bench scrapers underneath it. So you can like almost see where it is. It's about there. So I'll go about half that. Shouldn't take too long. If you don't get it halfway reduced, you only get it reduced by a quarter, not a big deal. All right, that looks good to me. I boiled that for about four minutes. One ingredient I did not tell you about, because I forgot, was to use four sprigs of thyme. So I'll just add them in there now. If I put that fifth one in, the dish would be really bad. You're joking. Yes, I'm joking. If people can't detect that sarcasm, you need to learn to detect sarcasm. I mean, that's the bottom line. All right, I'm going to make some room here. I'm just going to pull everything off to the side. I'm going to add these chicken thighs skin side up. Pour the remaining chicken juices in there too. I'll just take some garlic cloves, like get everything kind of distributed. Take some of the sauce and just pour it over each one. All right, in the oven for one hour. That is all you have to do. Now look, you're worried about overcooking chicken bone and skin on chicken thighs? Don't be, okay? Don't be worried, all right? Just at minimum, cook these to 185 degrees Fahrenheit internal. Many of you will say in the comments, still to this day, you're only supposed to cook chicken thighs to 160 or 165. That is 100%, 1,000,000% wrong. These have a ton of connective tissue in here, and they need to be, internally, they need to be at least 180 degrees. But the longer you cook these, they're going to get more tender. That's just the nature of chicken thighs. They are super unforgiving. And then for that reason, they're the best type of protein, chicken protein to use for dishes like this. They are forgiving, not unforgiving. Forgiving, thank you. Yeah. Thank you. It's okay, you're forgiven, you're forgiven. Thank you. Okay, in the oven. So that's 40 clove garlic chicken. You can put a little tarragon on top and parsley. All right, 40 clove garlic chicken. We're going to see what the taste tester thinks in a sec. James, thank you for being here. I want to preface this right away. I'm going to show you in the beginning. So James just gave, it's probably his favorite thing ever, that the one he just tested before here. We always make two recipes in a day. So this is Peruvian chicken. Okay, the one that they sell in like P.O.P.O. and places like that with the green sauce. So it's going to be hard to beat that one right now. And often his ratings will- One of like my best tens. Yeah, and often your ratings will be dictated on what you ate right before. Yeah, that's what I said in the video, but who knows? This could be good. It looks really good. Yeah, it looks amazing. I'm going to smear some garlic on the bread. That's the beauty of that roasted garlic and the sauce. You get, you use the whole pan. I just served him one and then put the bread in the sauce. Here's the thing. The last one was just so good. I don't even like know if I'm going to be able to rate this properly. Like- Try to get that one out of your head. Try to be as unbiased as possible with this. Like come into it with a fresh set of eyes. Yeah, judge like the tenderness, the sauce. Tenderness is good. You got all the sauce there. Maybe dip a little bit in there. I'm going to put some garlic on this. I have to say, this is very good too. Is it as good as the Peruvian chicken? No, but it's definitely one of the better chicken dishes too, I would say. I would say like this, the Peruvian chicken, chicken parm, chicken parm might be like on par with the Peruvian chicken. We haven't done chicken parm in a long time. It might be time to redo that video. I don't even think I tasted this or that. I would say chicken piccata, chicken parm, that those are my like three best. What about chicken scarp? It's good. I would say it's like on par with this probably. The garlic like on the bread, it's so good. Like, but that's the garlic, like the chicken itself. It's like, it's good. It's like really solid, but it's not a 10 out of 10. I'm gonna give this a nine. Okay. It's not chicken parm, it's not the Peruvian chicken. It's not chicken piccata. Those are all like 10s. I would say it's on par with like chicken scarp, chicken scampi, I would say chicken piccata. Chicken scampi, that one's not out on the channel yet. I think chicken piccata is just better than chicken scampi, honestly. But then like below that, it's probably like eight out of 10s are probably like chicken marsala. That could even be a seven. Not the biggest fan of it, honestly. So marsala is a fortified wine and, you know, vermouth, similar, like more complexity and I can see how he's comparing them. You don't have to use vermouth in this. You can use dry white wine if you like as well. And, you know, say you can't have alcohol, you can just remove it completely as well. And then you just really have roasted chicken and garlic, roasted garlic. Yeah, garlic is delicious. Yeah. The garlic is like a 10, honestly. Yeah. But it's not the garlic, it's the chicken. This is the definition of simplicity though. I mean, so is the other one that he had. Anyway, thanks so much for watching. If you like these type of recipes, we'll make more of them. If you want us to do something else, we'll make those too. So always leave it in the comments if there's something that you think we haven't made yet and you want to see. I think you should start making some more like ethnic foods. On that note, we will see you next time.