Mr Food Recipe - If you have a chance to travel much in central Europe, especially by
train, you start seeing a lot of fascinating food-related things that
the glossy travel shows about seeing landmarks at high speed will never
have time to show you....
During the first few years that EuroCuisineLady and EuroCuisineGuy managed to get over there a few times each year, such sights included mobile distillers, firehouses with their own flocks of free range chickens, Michelin-starred railway station restaurants, and on-train convenience stores (either do your shopping when you get on and then relax with a coffee, or fax/email your order to the shop in the train car and have your bread, milk, pasta, wine or whatever ready to pick up when you board the train).* But one of our favorites -- and one that's surprisingly widespread in everyday food culture in Europe -- is what EuroCuisineGuy immmediately dubbed "The Chicken-Torturing Machine."
No chickens are actually tortured by this machine, as they're well
past any possible torturing by the time they go into it. What ECG is
referring to is the rotisserie truck that turns up at all kinds of
public venues -- street festivals and fairs, outdoor markets, and
(surprisingly often) train stations.
While you do see rotisserie trucks that feature such relatively
exotic specialties (to the North American eye) as crispy pork and veal
knuckle, most of them seem to do chicken, like the one in the photo to
the left.
Routinely, the slowly rotating and grilling chickens will be
basting chunky potatoes that have been placed below them to soak up
their savory juices. Marketers or commuters passing by on their way home
from work will stop to pick up one of these chickens and maybe some of
the potatoes, which get wrapped up in a greaseproof, heatproof bag. When
you get them home, you heat them up and then... what?
One of the best answers is this recipe, which we've adapted from Horst Scharfenburg's solid and reliable cookbook The German Kitchen
(see the Amazon widget down by the recipe proper: it's worth having).
The recipe (which in Scharfenburg's cookbook goes by the name Braunes Geflügelragout)
isn't so much for a stew, as a pre-stew: a rich, dark, savory,
lemon-scented gravy based on beef stock and augmented with red wine or
port. (You can leave the wine out if you're not inclined to add it, but
the gravy is much better with the wine included.) Our adaptation uses
wine instead of port, as it's too easy to get the wrong kind of port (or
one that's too good for gravy), but strong red wines with a little bit
of edge are everywhere, and those are exactly what you want for this: an
old-school Chianti is perfect.
Having prepared the gravy, all you do is shred the truck-bought (or
store-bought, or home-roasted....) roast chicken into it, and serve it
forth with your preferred side dish. The dish is therefore perfect for
those times when you're too exhausted to cook, or just can't be bothered
to. Additionally, the gravy can be made ahead of time and frozen in
small (or large) quantities. Then, when you get home from one of those
impossible days at work, all you have to do is defrost the gravy, rip up
the roast chicken you picked up at the local supermarket or convenience
store, dump it into the gravy for long enough to get friendly, and
serve.
In Freiburg-im-Breisgau in Germany, home of many great (and mostly
unknown) German red wines and a natural haven for this dish, we saw one
variant on the theme served with
spätzle:
elsewhere, closer to Austria, we saw it with noodles. But mashed
potatoes work just as well -- maybe even better than the local German
pasta variants, as the mash soaks up that wonderful gravy better than
anything else.
Our recipe doubles the amount of gravy in the original one, because, frankly, there's never
enough of this gravy. Anything extra after a meal, you can always
freeze for the next time you pass your own version of the
Chicken-Torturing Machine.
The ingredients:
- 4-5 tablespoons butter
- 1 onion, chopped as finely as possible
- 4 tablespoons plain flour
- 1 liter / 1 quart of beef stock (from stock cubes / bouillon cubes
if you like: we use the Kallo brand of "Just Bouillon" concentrated
stock and add a stock cube as well)
- 100 ml of a strong red wine: Chianti, Cabernet sauvignon, or
similar. (Omit this if you like, but add another 100 ml of water to the
stock to make up the difference.)
- 1 lemon, sliced into four or five thick slices
- 4 bay leaves
- Salt and fresh-ground pepper
- Optional: a dash or two of vinegar or lemon juice to sharpen the gravy at the end of cooking
- 750g - 1 kg or 1 1/2 - 2 pounds roast chicken, depending on how many
you're feeding: pulled off the bones and chopped or fork-pulled into
bite-size pieces
Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed non-reactive saucepan: add the finely chopped onions and cook until translucent.
Add the flour, stir well, and cook until this oniony roux is golden brown. Add more butter if necessary so that the mixture is semiliquid while it's browning.
Prepare the beef stock according to directions for whatever you're
using, concentrate or cube. Pour the beef stock and red wine into the
flour/butter/onion mixture and stir very well until smooth. (If you have
to use a whisk to get it to smooth out, that's fine.)
Add the lemon slices, bay leaves, salt and pepper. Allow the sauce
to come very briefly to a boil, stirring all the while to make sure that
the flour is all properly dissolved and thickening nicely; then lower
the heat and simmer the gravy for about 20 minutes, stirring
occasionally.
When the cooking time is complete, remove the lemon slices and bay
leaves. (Be sure you get all the bay leaves, as whole bay leaf can
damage people's insides if they accidentally ingest the central spine of
the leaf.) Pour the gravy through a fine strainer and use a wooden or
plastic spoon to push as much of the cooked onion as possible through
the strainer into the gravy. Test the seasoning, sharpen if necessary
with vinegar or lemon juice, and add salt or pepper if required.
