![]() ![]() ![]() Hazan's stew is surprisingly, deliciously creamy, but Hartnett's recipe has given me an idea to improve it further: using a mixture of chicken stock and white wine adds a savoury, meaty depth to the tomato sauce, which I'd modestly suggest makes it even better than the original. I think the latter's white wine works better than Oliver's red, which has a tendency to take over, giving the whole thing a whiff of coq au vin. The Silver Spoon dish is nice enough, though a little bland and oily (Italian tomatoes may fare better), but Oliver and Hazan's cacciatoras are the best: rich and flavourful. ![]() Smith's version suffers from the opposite problem: it's far too tomatoey, tasting more like a fresh and fruity pasta sauce than a meaty stew – the chicken is completely lost. Hartnett's tomato-free version is not what I want in a cacciatora: it may well be what hunters eat in Emilia-Romagna, where her maternal family is from, but I'm used to tomatoes, and I miss them. The Silver Spoon uses water as lubrication Oliver red wine Hazan and Delia Smith white wine and Hartnett a splash of white wine and chicken stock.Īll of them, with the exception of Hartnett, however, also add moisture in the form of tomatoes: tinned for Hazan and Oliver and fresh for the Silver Spoon and Smith, who also sticks in a tablespoon of tomato puree. Once it has been briefly fried to caramelise the outside, the chicken is then gently braised in liquid until not only cooked through, but as tender as can be. The sauce Angela Hartnett's chicken cacciatora. If you'd like to do the same, make sure you don't skimp on the fat during the initial saute stage, or you may end up with burnt, rather than browned, meat. No one mentions whether the chicken should keep its skin on during cooking, which I assume means it should – but although it provides a useful layer of fat, I'm not keen on the texture or the look of slow-cooked, shrivelled skin, so for my perfect recipe, I'm removing it. ![]() Oliver also marinades it in red wine, garlic and herbs overnight before use, but given all the different flavours going into the sauce, it's nice, as a contrast, to allow the meat to taste of just that. Oliver and Hazan both dust their chicken with seasoned flour before browning, which gives the meat a lovely golden crust. If you'd like a bit of variety, add them to the dish later, as Hazan suggests (about 15–20 minutes should do it), but I prefer to use just legs, as Angela Hartnett does in her book Cucina: the tastier, more succulent meat should be fairly falling off the bone after 45 minutes. Most suggest jointing a whole bird, but I find the breasts disappointingly chewy after such a long simmer. The chicken Marcella Hazan's chicken cacciatora.Īll the recipes I find call for chicken, so that's what I'm sticking with, but later in the season, it would be well worth experimenting with joints of pheasant or rabbit, or even whole partridge or other small birds. There are uncounted permutations in the dishes that go by the cacciatora name, but what they generally consist of is a … fricassee with tomato, onion, and other vegetables." Generally, yes – but, as we shall see, not always. Marcella Hazan explains in The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking: "Since there has always been a hunter in nearly every Italian household, every Italian cook prepares a dish with a claim to that description. Jamie Oliver reckons it's "obviously the type of food that a hunter's wife cooks for her fella when he gets back from a hard morning spent in the countryside", but I suspect it's more likely to have been originally made with rabbit or game birds – the slow, gentle braise would be the ideal treatment for such tasty, but potentially dry and stringy, meats.Īs with so many Italian classics, arguing about the animal used is only the beginning. Pollo alla cacciatora, or hunter's chicken, is such a stalwart of the traditional Italian restaurant menu in this country that it wasn't until I came to write this piece that I paused to wonder why anyone, Fantastic Mr Fox aside, would go out hunting and come back with a chicken. ![]()
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