Why 40 Cloves of Garlic Makes Chicken Incredible

Would you believe there's 40 cloves of garlic in this dish and it tastes incredible. This recipe is littered with foundational skills that will make you build better flavoured dishes at home. Now I've been wanting to do this recipe for years. Chef James Beard's famous 40 clove chicken. So with our chicken we're just removing the wishbone, removing the wing tips and then we're going to joint our chicken in a classic sort of sauté or fricassee way. So we are going to remove the legs, pop the thigh bone out. Then we're going to go through the thigh. As I prep my chicken I'm going to place it skin side down onto the paper so it really dries out for maximum Maillard reaction. With my drumstick as well, I'm just going to get a knife. I'm just going to go round the very top or the bottom of the leg, cutting through those sinews. And then taking a heavy knife, I'm going to chop the top of the leg off. I'm going to get some extra bones for my stock and as the chicken braises, the meat is going to shrink down giving us a really nice finish on the bone. And we'll do the same on the other side. So James Beard was a food writer in the US and he's sort of known as like the very first sort of American celebrity chef. The rest of my carcass, I'm just going to take that, chop it into smaller pieces, place it into a tray and we're going to use that as the basis of our stock later on. Then with the chicken breast just going to go down either side of the bone and then remove that on either side and then it gives us a little bit more bone to enrich our stock. You can cut it straight down the backbone leaving the breast on the bone. It does help protect the breast a little bit when it's cooking but we're going to be cooking this quite gently and quite quickly in the sauce and I'd rather get the flavour into the stock by roasting the bones deeper and then cooking my breast. Nice and gently in the stock. We're going to get all the flavour into the stock. So chickens is just drying out on that rack. So we're next going to prep our mirepoix, preparing all our vegetables for the actual main body of the dish. And then we're also preparing the vegetables for our enriched stock. So effectively we're cooking the stock twice. Giving us loads loads more opportunity for extra flavour. So we're using celery and then we're going to take off the leek tops which we're going to use in our stock saving the more tender white part for the main body of the dish. So save that bit for later alongside the celery base and then same with the onion. So remove that first layer of the onion that will go for our stock and we put all these tender vegetables away to the side ready to make our sauce in a second. For the stock we're going to place a pan on the stove, a good hit of oil in that pan, get it nice and hot and then we're going to go in with our chopped up chicken bones, roast that off really nicely, get a deep, deep mild reaction on it because that's going to give us the main flavour of our stock. So while our chicken is roasting off of the stock, we turn our attention to the humble amount of garlic in this recipe. As the name suggests, we're going to be using 40 Whole cloves of garlic. The reason this recipe works is because by slow cooking the garlic over a long period of time the flavours of the garlic change and develop and soften and go so much sweeter and beautiful. So that is the secret to this recipe. So you first, you have to bear with it and you have to embrace the cooking of the garlic to really get the benefits of this recipe. Okay so there we have it, 40 cloves of garlic. Now ultimate chef pack. Peeling garlic is an absolute nightmare but the best way to do it is to take some boiling water or very very hot water from the tap and just pour it over the cloves of garlic and you want to let that steep for about 10 to 15 minutes at least. In the hot water and that'll just slowly make the skins retract and you can basically pop the garlic straight out. And just keep roasting your bones on a medium-low heat, really want to develop that flavour in them. Okay so once your chicken is nice and brown, we're just going to go with the veg tops that we had from earlier. Followed by a sprig of thyme and a couple of bay leaves. Just going to give that a minute or two just to soften in the chicken fat. And this is a really quick and easy way that you can get loads of extra flavour at home when you're making a dish. Once the veg is nicely softened, Just going to chuck in our stock and because this is an enriched sauce going into our dish we don't need to gently simmer this. We're actually going to cook it quite hard and quite fast so it's going to get it up to a rolling boil and get it reducing and simmering at the same time. So after about, this has been about 10 minutes on our garlic, you can already see that the skins are starting to shrivel. So what you like to use is just this little turning knife, we call this in the industry a Tina Turner. And you're just going to pick up your garlic just with a small little cut, just cut off the bottom and the gut and then the whole skin just literally just peels off. Couldn't be easier. So we're going to take our 40 kilos of garlic and we've got a pan of boiling water here and we're just going to simmer it in this boiling water until the garlic becomes just tender. Should take anywhere in the region of 15 to 20 minutes. Now the reason we're doing this is to kill off the enzyme called allionase. Now this is the enzyme that gives the garlic its bitter It's a harshness. And by simmering it in a little bit of boiling water we're going to remove some of the sulfur compounds and start the sweetening process of the garlic. So we can prep the veg for the main body of the sauce now. So I've got some celery, I've got some leek which I'm just going to keep, I'm going to cut it sort of like a medium sort of size, not crazy fine. And the last thing I'm also going to put in is some mushroom. So I'm just going to cut those up nicely as well. Again just a similar sort of dice to the other vegetables. Of course that garlic's had about 15 minutes. So now we're going to strain it off and then we're just going to lay that down onto a tray. As you can see the garlic has started to kind of lose a bit of its natural colour, it's slightly soft to the touch. With a knife you should just be able to put your knife in, it's just a little bit of give in the very centre. Now it's time to chicken. We've got our classic saute pan on, good amount of oil in the bottom of the pan. Now I can just take some fine salt, I'm just going to season my chicken all over and then we're just going to place our chicken skin side down into Pushing down to get maximum surface area. I like to use a meat press whenever I'm searing meat, but ours is actually upstairs on service, so I'm just gonna use a pan lid just to help weigh down the chicken as it's searing. So at this stage now, we're just trying to keep our pan, keep the temperature nice and even, move our chicken around the pan, really looking about for color rather than the cooking of the chicken at this stage to develop the flavor in our finished dish rather than perfectly cooking the chicken because we'll finish the chicken cooking in the sauce. Obviously we've left a few of the bones on here we're just going to leave those in again for more flavor and that collagen is going to slowly start to break down as it's braising. Once you've got a nice color on the chicken you can then start turning it around once you've got a little bit of color on the bottom as well we're just going to remove the brown chicken from the pan. So now we're going to place our garlic into the residual Chicken fat, and we're just gonna roast the garlic on a high heat, lift off a little bit of that chicken fat off the bottom of the pan, a little bit of that fond, and you should get a beautiful smell of garlic straight away. I'm just gonna go in with a cup of a knob of butter, really focus on getting a beautiful caramelization of that garlic, because if we roasted it off with the other vegetables, you wouldn't quite get as much attention on it, you wouldn't get the nice caramelized edges all around, because you'd almost be sweating a little bit in the rest of the vegetables. That is looking beautiful. Well, in the words of Jim Carrey, B-E-A-U, people. Pour that garlic onto a tray, set that aside for later, and now we're going to build the base of the sauce. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go in with our white onion into the same pan. We're going to start it off medium-high, let that water from the vegetables come out, lift up all that caramelization on the bottom of the pan. Celery is a very, very key component of this dish. Now celery is very high in natural glutamates, which essentially means that it brings out – it doesn't necessarily mean the dish is going to taste of celery, what it does What it does is it brings out The flavour of other ingredients that you put it with. So the original recipe from James Beard actually pretty much only used celery and obviously the garlic. But we've added some leek and some onion and we will add some mushroom, which again is another vegetable that's very high in glutamate. Um, because we found that it just helps slightly elevate the base. So nice and high heat. I'm gonna go in with a knob of butter again. Touch of salt at this stage as well. Once that water slowly starts to come off those vegetables, we can then add in our mushrooms. Spread that out nicely and then just keep caramelizing that down. We're not looking for a crazy amount of color here. We want to keep it quite pale. Okay, so our veg is looking nice and soft now. So we're going to stick... True to the original, we're going to deglaze with vermouth. So vermouth is basically wine that's sort of been infused with Aramaic botanicals. And that base flavor is going to enhance the tarragon we're going to then put later into the sauce. And stays true to the sort of provincial roots of the dish. Who am I to argue with Mr. James Beard? We're going to juice that down by about 50%. We're going to go half of the garlic now on the base and then a few cloves over the top. Lay our chicken back on top. This dish was released by James Beard in the 1950s. The Americans went absolutely crazy for it. He cooked it on TV, he cooked it with celebrity chefs and was... Spoke about as one of the main dishes of the American food revolution. Pop the last few bits of garlic over the top, then we're going to take that stock that we made earlier and just pour that over, well not over the skin, you want to try and keep leave the skin as clear as you can and you want the stock to come off about 50% of the way up the chicken. You don't want too much stock because you want just the right amount. So you get the right concentrated flavour in your sauce. So then we can just move it around, space out your chicken. That's just about right there and then you can see all the garlic cloves popping around and we're going to turn the heat up to medium and you guessed it, so it wouldn't be a fallow braise without a cartouche. Cartouche over, heat's on a low simmer. This has been about 16 minutes now, our chicken is looking cooked so we can remove our cartouche. Turn the heat off and we're going to slowly remove our chicken. Let the excess liquid drip off. Leave that there to cool down slightly. We're going to use the garlic as an emulsifier and a thickener for the sauce. But I am going to remove a few cloves of garlic because they look like they make really good presentation on the finished dish. Put the pan back on, touch of black pepper into the sauce now. I'll reduce our sauce ever so slightly. I'm now just going to go in with a nice dollop of creme fraiche or two and I'm just going to blend this. I'm just gonna pass our sauce through our strainer. So sauce back into the pain, le pain jus. So now we're just gonna put our chicken underneath the hot grill just to re-crisp that skin before we put it back in our sauce to glaze. So we're gonna serve this with a big old crusty chunk of sourdough bread. Gonna give it a nice little oil into a pan. Want it nice and crispy on the outside so it really soaks up that garlic sauce. Still soft enough in the middle that we can use it as a proper. Flavour sponge. Okay, while the bread's toasting, just gonna cut a little bit of parsley. Again, as always, not gonna go too fine. So now we're just gonna put our chicken back into the pan, put our garlic back in our dish, and then add in our parsley and tarragon. We are following the traditional method and recipe that James Beard did. You take the garlic cloves and crush them into the bread as you're serving. And it should just completely melt away into the bread. Oh, look at that. Proper flavour sponge. And then we're just gonna build up. Perfect dish for the centre of a table and now the all-important taste test. It's all the flavours you know and love from your classic chicken braises but it just gives you such a different complexity with all the garlic. It's rich, slightly sweet, full of umami from all those extra vegetables you put in there, nice bit of acidity from the creme fraiche and the vermouth really gives you a beautiful sweetness and a bit more complexity than that just normal white wine and these soft garlic cloves that you can just spread on the bread, so delicious. You wouldn't believe there's 40 cloves of garlic in this chicken, but every single one is necessary. Not 39, not 41, it's 40 clove chicken.