Chicken Chasseur | Classic French Hunter’s Chicken Recipe

If you love French food, you need this chicken chasseur recipe. Chicken chasseur is a very old classic French dish. Chicken chasseur means hunter's chicken. Originally, it was not about chicken. It was about what the hunter is going to find in the wood in the forest. So classically, really, it would be more like a pheasant or it would be like a rabbit. And in the forest, when you go hunting, you will find also some mushroom. And in France, you've got also parsley, tarragon, you know, tomato, white wine in every sauce to deglaze the pan. So it's really, really a classical old French stuff. But it was not made with chicken. Now we make it classically everywhere with chicken. Very simple. Everybody can get a chicken. So just an easy version of something which was originally more like a hunter style of food. Whatever you're going to find in the forest, when you come back, you actually put it together in the pan in a certain order, of course. So what are we going to do today? We're going to prepare it just with the chicken. But the idea is to really understand all the techniques and the deglazing and all that kind of stuff to prepare a very simple, very humble dish. Still tasty, delicious and really quick. You know, I'm using one pot one more time. Just very simply will be done in like 45 minutes maximum. We'll have something to eat. So it's really good. So you take a heavy pot, a heavy skillet with a heavy bottom. And what I mean when we warm up the butter on a bit of olive oil. And then we're going to give some color to our pieces of chicken, which we have salted already. Very important. No pepper, just the salt because pepper could actually burn and get a little bit bitter. So it's really important to go gently with your seasoning at the beginning. You see that I'm using chicken legs, you know, the thigh on the drumstick. You could use other piece of a chicken. You know, you can leave the leg whole. You can use just the breast with the wings, you know, but it's all different options. It's just a really good idea to have pieces with the bone in. You know, it's much more flavor. Gives you a better result. So I'm going to give a little color on every side before we actually start building our sauce into our pan. And then let it simmer gently. You'll see it's a very nice, quick, easy recipe which doesn't take long. So this is our chicken with a little coloration, golden brown on both sides. We have a little bit, not too much. You don't want to burn it. You want a good color for the flavor, obviously. And also for the color of your sauce, you know, it's really important. So we're pretty good now. We're going to remove the chicken. Take it out of the pot and then start making our sauce. And then finish the chicken. You see there's a nice, nice, even golden color. So that's really good. I'm going to take that out. Reduce the heat because then we're going to start sweating off our vegetable. So in our pan, we're going to add a shallot on the onions. No garlic just yet. When we add straight away the mushroom, we're going to sweat really everything. Get out of the water of the mushroom before we can actually deglaze. So that's going to take 5 to 10 minutes depending on your heat. You want to go on low heat because you don't want to actually burn your shallot and onions. You know, you really want the thing to sort of sweat gently. Get those mushroom to sweat as well. So we just let it very gently just like that. No interfering too much. While we're waiting for mushroom to sweat, we prepare our fresh herbs. So I'm doing right now some tarragon and we do some fresh parsley too. Ready for the next step in just a minute. So you can see that all the shallot, onion and the mushroom have been really sweating off. Nice. So now we're going to let it a little longer just to get a little bit of color. Color is important because it gives flavor too. So a couple of more minutes before we can add our garlic. To prepare all those chicken dishes which we do, what's really interesting is to buy whole chicken or to debone it yourself. Of course, you get better value for your money. And also you've got different pieces. You've got the carcass which you can make your stock. So it's really, really interesting to learn how to do it properly. So if you're interested in learning a bit more about French cuisine and deboning a chicken as an example, check out our website. LeGourmetFrenchChef.com Where you can see there's lots of different videos, lots of different courses. But on the 12-week program, there is a section on how to debone chicken in different ways. In fact, there's not only one way. There's different ways to prepare different pieces of chicken. We also have the same about fish. If you're interested about learning more, check out the website and drop me in the comments what sort of dish you would like to learn. And also give me some ideas always to have some interesting videos for YouTube. So for you. Now you can see that we're getting a bit of color on the mushroom at the bottom. We don't want to go too far into color. We don't want to have anything burning because obviously that will be bitter. Now we're going to add our garlic very, very quickly. We're going to sweat it off as well. We have to go very extra careful because the garlic will actually burn within a minute. So it's really important to keep an eye on it. When you do that sort of thing, you don't walk away. You don't do anything else. You buy the stove or you can smell. I can smell this garlic sweating off. It's beautiful. Voila, you see. And a few more seconds when we've got a white one ready, we're going to deglaze our pan in just a moment. Okay, now it's time to deglaze. We don't want to burn anything, you see. There we are. So when you deglaze, you really pour your wine or your, you know, it's white wine in that case, you know, or any other dish could be red, depending what you make, but we're having wine. Now you see you're cleaning the bottom of the pot. You see, this is most important. This is really key of success of your sauce. Which is a success of your dish. We're going to evaporate the alcohol. We're going to reduce the wine about half, you know. It's really important as well. You don't want to keep the acidity of the wine. Sometimes it can be also a bit bitter. I'm using Sauvignon Blanc, by the way, when I cook. I don't think I mentioned it before, but cooking wine, I buy some Sauvignon Blanc, a decent cooking wine. It's easy for me to say that in France, you know, because we get something decent, really good for not too expensive. I know depending where you are in the world, it's not exactly the same. So you see that reduce well enough. The stove is quite high heat. And then now we're going to add our tomatoes. We're going to add our stock. Voila. And a little bit of tomato paste. It's like a spoon. That will give a bit of raw richness and a bit more color. Voila, we're going to bring that back to a good boil before we can add our chicken and then let it simmer very gently. In the same time, we can have now... So we're going to season our sauce because we seasoned our chicken, but the sauce we haven't. Very important, you know, I say that all the time, but depending on the stock you have, depending on the stock you buy, if you don't make your stock like I do mine, you have to be really careful. You can have salt in your stock already. So really, really important to check whatever you buy. If it's not homemade, check, double check to make sure you're not adding too much salt. Then we've got our fresh herbs. In my case, I've got my fresh tarragon. Add a little bit of parsley, like a spoon, and I'll have extra for the top later on. Voila. Now we're going to put back our chicken into a dish, into a pot, let's say, and we're going to let it simmer on low heat. I'm going to change the heat in a minute. We're going to let it simmer very gently for 25 minutes, roughly. You really want to cook your chicken all the way in, you know, it's really important. You don't want any pink or raw chicken. Voila. So I'm going to put the lid on, and then I'm going to let it simmer very gently for 25 minutes, and then we will double check in 25 minutes that it's fully cooked, and then it's finished. So our chicken has been cooking for exactly 30 minutes. So we're going to check that it's fully cooked. We can see it's fully cooked. You can see the meat detaching from the bone, which you just double check if you really want to, but we can really see it's cooked. Before we present it, we're going to take out the chicken from the sauce. We're going to check the seasoning of our sauce, and then it's ready to be served. You see, very simple, very quick and easy. You know, we could say that what was done in exactly 45 minutes. Et voila, this is our chicken chasseur or hunter style chicken ready to be served. Completely finished. Don't forget, you know, really important, I know I already said it, but to check the seasoning of your sauce before you nappe, before you go and serve it to your guests, you know, we test, you know, throughout the recipe. We test at the beginning, we put salt, we test at the end, and we retest just before to send the plate, just to make sure. Very, very important. You will have in the description down below a link to go to our website, to go to our blog, where you got all the recipe which we have on this channel. So don't forget to go and check it out. And also, once you're on the website, you can check out the gourmetfrenchef.com, all the different courses we offer to learn French cuisine, to learn desserts, sauces, the foundation of French cooking. So check it out. Don't forget to like this video, to subscribe to the channel, to share it with your friends, foodie friends, or anybody who's interested about learning about French cuisine, and just learning about cooking in general, because learning French cuisine is not only about French cooking, but it's learning the technique of, you know, cooking, which can be used all around the world, you know, it's not about French food only. And also, to drop me in the comments what dishes you would like to see next, and also what would you serve with this chicken chasseur. There's lots of options. I'm really interested to see around the world who does what, you know, it's quite amazing that we've got a community around the world completely watching this, and it's funny to see who does what. So thank you for watching. Bon appétit and à bientôt.