Poulet Basquaise

As tradition built it

Serves 6. 20 minutes' preparation, about an hour's cooking.

Ingredients

• 1 chicken, in 6 pieces, or 6 chicken pieces
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped
• 3 onions, chopped
• 700 g red and green peppers, or sweet green peppers
• 1 kg tomatoes
• 6 tbsp olive oil
• to taste salt, and pepper or piment d'Espelette
• 1 bouquet garni
• 20 cl white wine

Method

1. Halve and seed the peppers under running water and cut them into strips.
2. Chop the onions and garlic. Peel the tomatoes, cut them and take out the hard centres.
3. Heat 4 tbsp oil in a large pot. Sweat the garlic, onion and peppers over a low heat about 5 minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon.
4. Add the tomatoes, salt and pepper. Cover and cook 20 minutes on a low heat.
5. Season the chicken and brown it in the rest of the oil in a sauté pan.
6. Add it to the vegetables with the bouquet garni and wine. Cover and cook 35 minutes.

Notes

The recipe is Orocbat's, a French Basque maker of traditional dishes. Larousse grills and peels the peppers, uses tinned tomato and paprika, and browns 100 g of diced jambon de Bayonne with the chicken.

What a modern chef changes

The chicken and the sauce base built with the same separation-then-combination logic as Dish 6.

Rung 6

Method

1. Brown and finish the chicken separately from a fully reduced piperade base, combining only in the final 10 minutes, so the chicken skin stays properly crisp rather than steaming in the sauce for the full cooking time.
2. Use chicken thighs only, bone-in, rather than a whole jointed bird, for more even cooking and a more forgiving finish under this technique.
3. Finish with Espelette pepper at the table rather than in the pan, the most literal version of Rung 6 in this chapter's whole dish list.