Basque Chicken - it's good!

Passport & Plate - Basque Chicken Braised With Beans & Chorizo

Spain | Thursday, March 5, 2015 | 5 photos

Ingredients
60ml olive oil
150g sliced chorizo (nice and spicy)
200g smoky bacon, diced
10 pieces of chicken (ideally a mixture of legs and thigh meat)
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 bay leaves
4 sprigs of thyme
200ml of robust red wine
2-3 tins of crushed tomato
2 x 400g tins of cannellini beans, drained and rinsed well
200ml chicken stock
Small handful of sage leaves

 

How to prepare this recipe
Preheat an oven to 150 degrees C, and heat a good splash of the olive oil in a large casserole over a medium heat on the stove. Add the chorizo and bacon, cook until the oils have been released, then remove, leaving the beautifully flavoured oil to brown a mixture of chicken thighs and legs, setting aside once well-coloured. Add the sliced garlic and finely diced onion, cook gently to not burn the garlic, add the bay leaves and thyme, and cook until the onion is soft. Add the crushed tomato and red wine, scraping the bottom of the casserole to deglaze, simmer for 15 mins, then add the (hot) chicken stock, chicken pieces and the chorizo, and cook in the oven for 1 hour. Stir though the cannellini beans, and return to the oven for another hour; possibly more depending on how much liquid is left. Once cooked, shallow fry a handful of sage leaves in a small amount of oil, drain on kitchen paper, add to the casserole, and serve – ideally with more of that robust red wine.

 

The story behind this recipe
My Recipe Story

The Basque country – hardly the most visited region by the tourist hordes in France and Spain, but an area known by many food lovers around the world as a source of sublime cuisine. After visiting the Basque country for the first time myself in 2013, I was very quickly able to see how the appreciation of good food seems to flow right through the veins of the locals; it’s something a food heaven.
Bilbao for instance (perhaps most famous for its ultra-modern Guggenheim Museum), is a foodie’s paradise, yet it’s not something that you see or feel so much from a distance. Its reputation is quieter, it’s ‘delivery’ of fine foods far more restrained than that of Paris, or even Barcelona. You really need to get up close and experience it for yourself in the laneways. Find yourself at any given pintxo bar for lunch, and you’ll soon be smiling irresistibly at the staff after tasting plate after plate of their supreme creations. They smile back at you in a politely appreciative yet equally quiet self-assured manner – they know it’s good – they are simply waiting for you to find it out for yourself.
On return to Australia, I quickly set about finding a Basque cookbook to recreate some of the foods I’d fallen in love with, and within a week I’d found ‘My Basque Cuisine’ - a fantastic cookbook by London-based Australian chef Ash Mair. In the time since returning home, I’ve cooked a good number of recipes from this cook book, but the one I keep going back to the most is a slow-cooked braise of chicken, tomato, plenty of herbs, cannellini beans, and what surely what must be the world’s greatest sausage, the chorizo. Rustic, yet supremely tasty, it takes me back to the narrow lanes of old Bilbao far better than any photograph ever could, and has more flavour than just about any dish I can think of.