The Levant and Anatolia · Volume 01, The Oil Coast, the Anchovy Coast and the Court Between Them
Çerkez Tavuğu
Istanbul, palace and public table alike
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 1 hour
- Researched
- 20 sources cited
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Poached chicken bound in a walnut and bread purée, and the clearest test in this chapter of the blend-and-strain discipline.
History at Rung 2 and above: a real but imprecisely dated connection to nineteenth-century Circassian migration into Istanbul.
As tradition built it
Serves 4 to 6. About 1 hour.
Ingredients
- 1 whole chicken
- 200 g walnuts
- 2 to 3 garlic cloves
- 2 slices stale bread, soaked in the poaching broth
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- to taste salt, black and red pepper
- a drizzle red pepper flakes, warmed in oil
Method
- Poach the chicken in salted water for 30 to 35 minutes, reserve the broth.
- Crush the walnut with the garlic, the soaked bread, cumin, salt and pepper.
- Blend to a purée, letting down with a little more broth until pourable.
- Shred the cooled chicken and bind it thoroughly in the purée.
- Plate, finish with paprika oil (oil warmed with red pepper flakes) and a scatter of walnut pieces.
- Serve warm or cold.
What a modern chef changes
The sauce's texture as the whole point.
Rung 2
Method
- Blend the walnut sauce properly smooth in a high-power blender, then always pass it through a chinois before binding the chicken; this removes the tannic walnut-skin grit that separates a chalky home version from a clean restaurant one.
- Do not skip the paprika oil finish. It is a genuine textural and flavour contrast to the smooth sauce beneath it, not decoration.
- Serve the sauce slightly looser than feels right off the blender; it thickens further as it cools around the chicken.