Poulet vallée d'Auge

As tradition built it

Serves 6. Prep 30 minutes, plus 50 minutes to cook.

Ingredients

• 1 farm chicken, 1.8 kg, cut into pieces
• 7 reinette apples, peeled and quartered
• 20 cl liquid cream
• 1 glass dry cider
• 1 liqueur glass Calvados
• 1 pinch nutmeg
• 80 g butter
• 3 tbsp oil
• to taste salt and pepper

Method

1. Brown the chicken pieces, seasoned with salt and pepper, in the oil.
2. Flambé with the Calvados.
3. Add the cider and nutmeg and simmer 15 minutes.
4. Separately, sauté the apple quarters in butter.
5. Return the chicken to the apples and their pan juices, cover and cook a further 20 minutes.
6. Mash four of the apple quarters into the sauce to thicken it, then stir in the cream and bring back to the boil to finish.

Notes

A representative recipe, from the French food writer and broadcaster Julie Andrieu.

What a modern chef changes

Cider reduced separately, sous vide confit, and a chinois-clarified finish

Rung 2

Method

1. Reduce the cider on its own, hard, before it ever meets the cream, concentrating its acid structure the way the technique ladder sets out, rather than letting the two cook down together and dilute each other.
2. Confit the chicken thighs sous vide in a little of their own fat and a splash of the Calvados before finishing them in a hot pan for colour, so the meat stays properly moist through the second simmer rather than tightening as chicken pieces cooked straight through in a sauce tend to.
3. Clarify the finished sauce briefly through a chinois after the apple is mashed in, for a silkier, less grainy body than the rustic original.
4. Use a properly bittersweet, high-tannin cider throughout, not a sweet, thin one, since the whole dish's balance depends on it.