Fall & Winter Budget Recipes, Volume III: Balsamic Chicken
In my real life, I’m working hard on a Serious Article for an Actual Magazine, but I do seem to have caught the food blogging bug bad, so here it goes. Part three of budget recipes, in which I continue to eat my way through this recession depression market correction fascinating time.
My mother used to make this dish when I was a kid; it joined the rotation of 25 or 30 standard weeknight recipes probably when I was in 4th grade or so. I never liked it much: preparation would make the whole house stink of balsamic vinegar, and the resultant dish was full of dry white-meat chicken insufficiently penetrated by thin brown sauce. She served it with white rice, which wasn’t really my thing either.
Fast-forward a dozen years. I’ve made a couple small tweaks to the recipe (use dark-meat chicken and serve over egg noodles), and lo: balsamic chicken is now one of my favorite things. It’s one of the simplest things you can do with bone-in chicken, it’s pretty fast, and from a budget perspective, the only ingredient that costs much of anything is the meat.
One caveat: do what you want, but I gave up on supermarket chicken a while ago, and I am not responsible for your results if you use it in this dish. I made a coq au vin last year with affordable chicken from our local Met, and the whole thing ended up tasting kind of like dish soap. Every six months or so I get seduced by a chicken bargain at the grocery, and it’s always the same thing: the meat has the texture of pre-chewed food, and the taste is disgusting, bland and sort of sudsy. If you want to eat dirt cheap, eat beans and rice. If you want to enjoy meat, do as people did a couple of generations ago and think of chicken as a special treat, but buy the good stuff. A roast free-range chicken is like heaven, and you can get a few meals out of it and then use what’s left for soup. Yes, it’s still pretty costly and that’s why I don’t do it very often, but when I do, it always feels like an occasion.
Okay, off my stump now, and on to the cooking.
BALSAMIC CHICKEN
Servings: 3
Price per serving: $1.93
Half of a pound bag of broad, curly egg noodles ($0.65)
Half a head of garlic (yes, like 7-10 cloves) ($0.15)
One-third to one-half cup balsamic vinegar—cheap is fine ($0.48)
Natural/free-range chicken pieces, bone-in (3 drumsticks, 3 thighs) ($4.52, @ $1.79/lb.)
Salt
Pepper
Flour for dredging
Oil for frying
Rinse off the chicken and pat it dry with a paper towel. Put about half a cup of flour in a mixing bowl and add salt and pepper. Dredge each chicken piece, making sure that it gets good and coated with flour.
Heat up a few tablespoons of oil in a deep-sided frying pan. (I used olive; vegetable is fine.) Start to brown the chicken, till it’s a little crispy on each side.
While that’s happening, peel and chop the garlic. Even if you’re usually a garlic-press kind of person, peel it and rough-chop it with a big knife. Put the garlic in a measuring cup, and pour in balsamic vinegar to the half-cup mark. Add half a cup of water.
Put on water to boil for the egg noodles.
When the chicken is well-browned, Pour the garlic and vinegar mixture into the frying pan. Cover, and bring to a simmer.
Cook until the chicken is done. If there’s one tricky thing about the recipe, this is it—you need the chicken to be done, but if it’s overdone, it will start to shrink a lot and fall apart. I usually just cut into the meaty part of a thigh with a knife and fork to check for doneness, and it seems to take about 20 minutes after I add the liquid, but if there’s a better way, I’d love to hear it.
You can add more water and more vinegar during the cooking if you think it needs it. There should be about half an inch of rich liquid left in the bottom of the pan at the end, to pour over the noodles. You’ll probably want to tip the pan to the side and skim off as much of the fat as you can easily get off with a spoon before serving—the chicken skin gives up a lot of fat while it’s cooking, but I love chicken skin and wouldn’t dream of throwing it away beforehand. I think it’s part of what makes this dish decadently gooey.
Serve with a vegetable.
This makes fine leftovers, though the sauce will soak into the noodles during storage and reheating, meaning that it will never have quite the excellent slippery sauciness that it does on the first evening. However, if your office has a microwave, you can take the remainders for lunch and make the whole place reek of balsamic vinegar!
Part I: Caribbean Vegetable Stew
Part II: Baked Apples
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