Pollo al Chilindrón

As tradition built it

Serves 4 . About 1 hour 30 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 free-range chicken or hen, jointed
• 25ml olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, sliced
• 80g onion, julienned
• 3 dried pimiento choricero, soaked in just-off-the-boil water for about 5 minutes, pulp scraped from the skin
• 200g roasted red pepper
• 2 tomato

Method

1. Brown the jointed chicken or hen.
2. Slice the garlic and cook gently in olive oil for about 5 minutes.
3. Add the onion in julienne.
4. Soak the dried pimiento choricero in just-off-the-boil water for about 5 minutes, then scrape its pulp from the skin with a small knife, since the pulp alone, not the whole pepper, carries the flavour and colour into the sauce.
5. Add the roasted red pepper, tomato and pimiento choricero pulp, and build into a slow sofrito.
6. Reduce the whole slowly until the chicken's meat separates easily from the bone.

What a modern chef changes

Confit chicken and a blended pepper base

Rung 6

Method

1. Confit the chicken thighs and legs separately at a controlled low sous vide temperature before browning, giving fully even doneness the traditional braise's uneven heat cannot promise across bone-in pieces of different thickness.
2. Build the pepper-and-tomato base in a high-power blender once reduced, per rung six's logic applied here to vegetables rather than fat, for a smoother, more concentrated sauce than a hand-worked sofrito typically achieves.
3. Finish with a few drops of a bright pepper oil, made by gently warming a little of the pimiento choricero's own soaking liquid with olive oil, spooned over at the table rather than folded through the sauce.