Ballottine/Poulet en Saucisse
I really like galantine- and ballottine-type things but I'd never made one. I watched my friends John and Kara make a turducken once, but that was entirely another order of magnitude in terms of size of undertaking. This month's Le Menu has a recipe for a roast made from stuffed and rolled chicken breasts that sounds pretty good and that got me thinking about galantine. Techniques, as expected, provided step-by-step instructions.
I figured that boning the chicken would take a while, but it turned out to only be about 30 minutes. With practice it would be much faster. Here's the boned-out bird:
I more or less followed the recipe, though I skipped the liver and extra fat in the meat filling (mistake) and added some rehydrated porcinis to the mushroom mixture (good move):
We couldn't find cheesecloth per se yesterday (and we live in the land of cheese... how could that be?), so I ended up using "gauze cloths" from the baby department of Coop. Funny place to buy it, but basically the same thing:
After browning this (through the gauze... weird!), I poached it in chicken stock for 1.5 hours. My only deviation for the poaching liquid was to use a bit of fennel stalk instead of a rib of celery.
Here's the finished ballottine, ready to be sliced:
The end result is tasty, but it does take rather a long time and I would make some changes before doing it again:
- I overfilled the bird a bit, so it kind of fell apart on slicing.
- Just using seasoned ground pork as the filling was a mistake. The liver and added fat (to make a pate de compagne there in the middle) would have made this much better.
- I didn't reduce the stock enough to get an aspic for serving. This didn't make Andrea (an aspic skeptic) unhappy, but I will still go ahead and reduce the stock some more tonight.
2 comments:
this was a fun post, Greg. Not something I'll be attempting any time soon. But it was neat to see it illustrated and your effort detailed.
I did this about a week ago (Aug 12, 2011), for the first time, directly from Pepin's book. I was *going* to bone the chicken myself, then asked a meat man at my upscale AJ's in Tucson to do it instead. He did a perfect job in about 3 or 4 minutes. I used the chicken liver and fat as directed, and it make a nice stuffing. I let it cool overnight in the fridge, and then reduced the liquid to 4 cups initially, then reduced that as per the recipe to 1.5 cups. Tasty but NOT enough gelatin in it to make it really good aspic. Next time I would reduce it to no more than half a cup OR I would add a packet of powdered gelatin at some point. A very good dish! Mistake: I made it as a special dinner for some beautiful Filipina girls who are foodies -- but who grew up *hating* chilled food. They ate it politely but weren't blown away by it. It would be a good buffet dish for about a dozen people (with other things to eat, of course.)
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