Poaching chicken in vinegar

I have this pile of books on my desk which I have recently purchased, or which are first recipe or lucky dip books. So on a rainy day like today when I'm mildly suffering with a head cold, and not feeling up to much, I picked up one and turned to one of the recipes I earmarked for inspiration.

The book is The Food of Italy: a Journey for Food Lovers, from Murdoch Books. And I may talk about the book as a whole later on.

For the moment though I will just concentrate on the recipe - Vinegar-poached chicken. There is no Italian name given - it's not that kind of book, so, truth to tell I'm not sure whether this actually is an Italian recipe or just a recipe that uses balsamic vinegar - well there is also a small picture of balsamic vinegar ageing in casks by the recipe.

Short aside - I still regret enormously not taking advantage of the opportunity of visiting a maker of balsamic vinegar, on one of our Italian holiday trips in the Modena/Parma region. Our hostess gave us a taste of the real thing. I should have bought some of that too. Oh the touristy things that we don't do at the time and the touristy things we don't buy because we consider them too touristy at the time.

Back to the chicken. I'm not sure whether it is indeed a classic Italian dish, because in spite of my best efforts I have not really found any other similar recipes. I have found the French Poulet au vinaigre, which I think I have written about and the variations thereof. None of them said anything about basing their recipe on an Italian dish however. And besides it's braised not poached.

I also found an Italian/American dish called Chicken Scarpariello (Shoemaker's chicken), a version of which is on the Serious Eats website, but this also is more akin to Poulet au vinaigre - a braised dish rather than poached, although it does look pretty delicious, and does use a fair bit of vinegar - from the jar of pickled cherry peppers in this case.

Poaching chicken is not what one tends to think of when wondering what to do with your chicken or pieces of chicken is it? Boring is the word that immediately springs to mind. Try it some time, however and you might be very pleasantly surprised. Even the simplest approach of immersing pieces of chicken in some stock, wine, or just water, flavoured with tarragon and maybe some carrots and celery, maybe a touch of lemon, will surprise you with the moistness of the chicken and the flavour of the sauce you can concoct with the stock it cooked in. And you also have some delicious stock to use in something else.

So I was therefore rather tempted by this recipe. For 4 small chickens (500g each - so poussins really), you chop 1 large carrot, 1 large onion and a celery stalk, and place them in the base of your pot. Add a bouquet garni, 1 1/2 tbspns sugar, 500ml white wine vinegar and 3 tbspns balsamic vinegar. Bring to the boil. Simmer for 5 mins. Sit your chickens on top, add enough boiling water to cover and simmer for 25 mins, until just cooked. Turn off and leave for 10 mins.

Make a sauce with butter, flour and chicken stock until thickened - then add 3-4 tablespoons of the poaching liquid. Put your chickens on your serving dish and pour over your sauce. Garnish with rosemary sprigs - which seems somewhat superfluous to me. Simple.

My go-to Italian experts, and my Italian cookbooks have not got a similar recipe, so I reckon that this is just made up by the authors of the book. Which is not at all to say that it's not worth trying. And since it doesn't seem to be authentic you don't need to worry about being authentic.

I found only one more Italian sounding vinegar poached chicken - Balsamic poached chicken on a website called Inspired Edibles, whose author, Kelly, freely admitted to having made it up.

The chicken is 4 breasts, the poaching liquid is 2 cups chicken stock, 1 cup balsamic vinegar, 1/4 cup soy sauce and 2 tbsp palm or coarse brown sugar. Having brought the liquid to a boil, you simmer for a mere 3 minutes, before leaving it for 15 minutes before serving. The sauce from the poaching is just drizzled over the sliced breasts. It sounds incredibly easy.

The only other people to poach in vinegar seem to be the Asians, who, of course, use rice vinegar. And here is one representative recipe but from our own Matt Moran - Asian style poached chicken. Also very simple, just put your whole chicken in a pot with the ingredients - the vinegars are rice and sherry.

Clean food.

YEARS GONE BY

July 10

2024 - Nothing

2023 - Nothing

2022 - Renewal

2021 - A recipe - cultural appropriation

2020 - Deleted

2019 - Nothing

2018 - Nothing