Stuffed Chicken Breasts with Mushroom Ragout

Stuffed Chicken Breasts with Mushroom Ragout

Recipe by William Colsher

This recipe was inspired by the "Rouelle of Four Story Hills Farm Poularde" in Thomas Keller's Under Pressure and the need to use up a batch of Modernist Cuisine At Home's "Shiitake Marmalade".

The dried mushrooms I used in the Mushroom Ragout are the "Forest Mix Mushrooms" from Chef Depot. Their website is a bit on the primitive side but service is excellent and the mushrooms are a bargain at $16.95 a pound.

The immersion circulator I use is the Anova model. It's inexpensive (relative to others) and works beautifully.

Ingredients

• 2 Chicken Breast Halves
• 4 Tbs Shiitake Mushroom Marmalade (recipe below)
• Salt
• Pepper
• Transglutaminase RM
• Mushroom Ragout (recipe below) 

Cooking Directions

1. Carefully trim all excess fat and connective tissue from the chicken. Gently flatten the breast halves.
2. Place the breast halves skin side down on an 18 inch sheet of plastic wrap. Season lightly with salt and pepper.

3. Spread the mushroom ragout down the center of one of the breast halves.

4. Carefully sprinkle the transglutaminase around the edges of the  mushroom breast half.
5. Cover the mushroom breast half with the the other one, tucking it under so it makes solid contact with the transglutaminase coated areas.

6. Roll the breasts as tightly as possible into a cylinder. Tie off the ends. Place the cylinder in an airtight container and refrigerate overnight.

7. Place the chicken cylinder, still sealed in plastic wrap, in a sous vide bag and seal, removing as much air as possible without deforming the cylinder.
8. Heat a water bath to 62 C and cook the chicken cylinder for 90 minutes.
9. Remove the chicken cylinder from the water bath and unpack it. Gently dry it with paper towels.

10. Carefully slice the cylinder in 1 cm. disks. 
11. Place a bed of mushroom ragout on a plate and arrange three slices of the chicken on top.
12. Spoon some of the mushroom gravy over the slices. 
13. Serve with roasted potatoes

Shiitake Marmelade

Adapted from Modernist Cuisine At Home

Ingredients

• 300 g Shiitake Mushroom Caps
• 60 g Unsalted Butter
• 60 g Shallots, finely minced
• 100 g Water
• 36 g Soy Sauce
• 4 g Honey

Cooking Directions

1. In a food processor fitted with the steel blade mince the mushroom caps. Pulse carefully - don;t let them become a puree.
2. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat and cook the mushrooms, stirring occasionally, until they are lightly browned and rather dry.
3. Add the shallots to the pan and cook, stirring occasionally, until they are softened and translucent.
4. Add the water, soy sauce and honey to the pan and stir to combine.
5. Simmer until the mixture is slightly thickened.

Mushroom Ragout

Recipe by William Colsher

Ingredients

• 1.5 oz Mixed dried mushrooms
• 2 Tbs Shallots, finely minced
• 2 cups Chicken Stock
• 2 Tbs Unsalted butter
• 2 Tbs AP Flour
• Salt
• Pepper

Cooking Directions

1. Pick over the mushrooms and rinse quickly under running water then place them in a heatproof bowl.
2. Bring 1 cup of the chicken stock to a simmer and pour it over the mushrooms. They should be completely covered. If necessary set a smaller bowl in top to hold them under the liquid.
3. Let the mushrooms soak until they are completely softened.
4. Lift the mushrooms out of the stock and chop coarsely. Reserve the soaking liquid.
5. In a small saucepan melt the butter over medium heat, then add the shallots and cook until they have softened and become translucent. 
6. Add the flour and cook, stirring, for a few minutes until the flour begins to color.
7. Add the mushrooms to the roux and stir to combine.
8. Carefully strain in the reserved mushroom soaking liquid, stirring and add the remaining chicken stock
9. Bring the mixture to a boil, reduce the heat and cook until slightly reduced and thickened.
10. Season to taste.

Bonci Dough & The Modernist Baking Steel

In my seemingly endless quest to make the perfect pizza (whatever that is) I recently came across something called The Baking Steel. This is nothing more than a heavy slab of treated steel that replaces the more traditional pizza stone. It has a couple obvious advantages: 1) it will never break and 2) its enormous thermal mass means even a rather wet pizza is going to cook very quickly. The big disadvantage is cost - $99. Nevertheless...

I had made a full batch on Bonci style dough for Tomato and Black Olive Focaccia over the weekend and still had two of the dough balls in the freezer when my Baking Steel arrived. So it seemed reasonable to use one of those for my first trial.

But first, I loaded the Baking Steel into the oven on a rack at the third from the top level. This is one level lower than suggested in the guidelines the company supplies, but I was pretty sure my pizza would be quite a bit taller than is typical. Pre-heat at 550 F for an hour and then...

Bonci Dough - Full Batch

Ingredients

• 1000 gm Bread Flour
• 800 gm Tepid Water
• 7 gm Yeast
• 20 gm Salt
• 40 gm Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Those quantities result in 3 big (about 600 gram), very soft dough balls. This dough is far too soft and sticky to ever slide off a peel on its own (after all it's meant to be baked on sheet pans). So I stretched one ball onto a piece of well oiled aluminum foil.

You can see from the wrinkling around the dough that it's already grabbing the foil in spite of the oiling.

Toppings were Neapolitan style: crushed tomatoes, fresh (as in made that morning) Valley Shepherd Creamery Mozzarella, a bit of crushed oregano and sea salt. Slide it onto the Baking Steel and about 10 minutes later I turned the broiler on high. After another minute I rotated the pizza and another minute later out it came:

2 inches of crispy and delicious

Yep. The Baking Steel worked exactly as advertised. Since we make pizza or some type of bread at least once a week, its worth the $99 (there's a thinner model for $79). It makes a tremendous difference in the the quality of what comes out of my oven.

Late to the Party - Modernist Mac and Cheese

Milk, Cheese, Pasta, Sodium Citrate

OK, so I'm a couple years late to this modernist cuisine party. So I decided to make a start with the famous Mac and  Cheese from Modernist Cuisine at Home. It turns out to be pretty easy and the only weird ingredient is Sodium Citrate.

Modernist Mac and Cheese

Recipe Adapted from Modernist Cuisine at Home

Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients

• 212 grams Milk
• 8.8 grams Sodium Citrate
• 228 Grams White cheddar Cheese, grated
• 192 Grams Dry Macaroni

Cooking Directions

1. Bring a large pot of unsalted water to a boil and cook the macaroni according to package directions. Drain the macaroni (do not rinse) and set aside, covered.
2. Combine the Milk and Sodium Citrate in a medium sauce pan and bring to a boil, stirring continuously until the Sodium Citrate is dissolved.

3. Add the grated cheese to the boiling milk in small handfuls, blending each with an immersion blender until melted and smooth.
4. Fold the macaroni into the cheese mixture.

5. Optionally, sprinkle some panko on top and slip it under the broiler to add some crunch.
6. Serve hot.

Notes:

The Pasta: Resist the urge to salt your pasta water. Good cheese will provide plenty of flavor.

The Cheese: Buy good cheese, not a block of that orange supermarket stuff. This recipe is all about the flavor of the cheese. It is perfectly reasonable to use $15 worth of Cabot Clothbound Cheddar in this recipe. I used Flory's Truckle, made in Missouri and finished in Iowa.

The Sauce: Although this recipe looks extremely accurate, you do need to pay attention. If the cheese sauce seems too thick, add a little more milk, a tablespoon or so at a time. Know that it will thicken as it cools - a lot.

Sodium Citrate: The brand I bought is listed below. 15 bucks may sound like a lot for a food additive, but it comes to about 29¢ per batch.And there's other stuff you can use it for...

The Book: You could buy Modernist Cuisine at Home, but if you have an iOS device you can also get the "inkling" eBook version and only buy the chapters you want for $4.99 each ($79.99 for the whole thing.) The eBook is not only cheaper, it also has a number of features that make it worth while including a shopping list builder and a built in "scaler" that adjusts ingredient quantities so you can make the recipe for any number of servings.