French | Chicken Normandy
Posted on August 9, 2012
Camembert cheese and Calvados are products of the Normandy region of France, both come together in this dish. We loved this dish, my only warning is to be careful when adding the brandy to the pan. The flame was much higher than I anticipated, in a related story, see "I Now Need a New Microwave Above My Stove." I got the recipe from a cooking school textbook, so it is written to serve 10. I copied the quantities as written, you can do the math to divide it down to how many you want to serve. The recipe is quite long, but really you are just cooking chicken in a pan and making a sauce. The recipe says to use chicken breasts supreme, wing bone frenched with skin on, but I just used boneless skinless breasts. This is my first recipe in my French adventure, so stay tuned for a more.
Yield: 10 servings
Ingredients
10 chicken breast supremes from fryer chicken, wing bone frenched, skin on (I used boneless, skinless)
kosher sea salt, to taste
freshly ground pepper, to taste
3 ounces clarified butter
10 ounces Camembert cheese, cut into 1/4-inch lengths
4 ounces shallots, minced
8 ounces Calvados
2 ounces chicken glaze or 2 cups of chicken stock reduced to 2 ounces
20 ounces heavy cream
Method
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Season the frenched chicken breasts with salt and pepper, and set aside.
Using two large sauté pans that can each hold 5 chicken breasts comfortably for sautéing, add half of the clarified butter to each of the pans and heat over a medium-high flame until the butter is very hot. Place 5 of the seasoned chicken breasts into each pan, skin side down, and sauté until they become golden brown before turning over to do the same to the other side. Adjust heat as necessary to ensure that the panes do not become burnt during this process, the pans will be used to make the sauce.
As soon as the chicken breasts have been seared on both sides and colored well, remove them from the pan and set them skin side up on a 1/2 sheet pan or other suitable pan for roasting.
Place the chicken breasts in the preheated oven and roast them for 5 minutes before removing them and placing 1 ounce of Camembert cheese on top of each breast. (I would hold off adding the cheese if you are going to put the chicken back in the oven later, the cheese melts too much in the oven.) Set them aside as the sauce is being made.
Using the same pans you used to sauté the chicken breasts, discard any excess fat remaining in the pan, except for a tablespoon or so, and return the pans to the stove over a high flame to reheat them.
Once the pans start to get hot, add the minced shallots and sauté them briefly until they just begin to color.
As soon as the shallots begin to color, add the calvados to the pan (be careful - the alcohol with flambé!). As soon as the flames die down, add the glaze and the cream to the pan while simultaneously scrubbing the bottom of the pan to dissolve the fronds left from the chicken into the sauce.
Once the cream sauce starts to simmer, turn down the heat so that the sauce very gently simmers and place the pan with the chicken breast and the cheese back into the oven. (I don't think you need to put it back in the oven to melt the cheese, it melted just find from the heat of the chicken.)
Roast the chicken in the oven for an additional 2 to 3 minutes to finish cooking the breast and melt the cheese. Remove it from the oven once again. (I think it works better to finish cooking the chicken without the cheese, then add the cheese outside of the oven.)
Finish the sauce by reducing it to nappe (coats the back of a spoon) consistency, and then check to see if the sauce needs seasoning before serving the sauce along with the chicken.
(Ref. 'Poulet Sautée a la Normande' recipe, International Cuisine textbook.)