Crispy chicken (and chicken skin butter)
And a simple tip to improve your chicken breast cooking
Dear friends,
Welcome to The Recovering Line Cook.
It’s been an exciting week for me. My family and I started moving into our new flat in a city called Turku. There’s loads of benefits to this move but top of the list is that THERE IS A PUBLIC ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORY IN OUR FRONT GARDEN!!!
Anyway, unless you’re casting for the next hobbit movie, you’re not here to see pictures of my stupid face. This week’s recipe is inspired by my time cooking lunch menus in Stockholm, Sweden, a place where plates of food aren’t really complete without a lot of brown butter.
So read on for a very tasty crispy chicken dish served with a butter flavoured with roasted chicken skin that, in my opinion, gives a true taste of Sweden at lunchtime.
Wil
I’d like to introduce you to what may be, depending on how much time you’ve spent in Sweden or watching the original version of Wallander, a new word.
That word is Husmanskost.
Husman refers to a “house owner”, and kost means something like “fare”. Husmanskost refers to simple, hearty food, full of energy, that made use of local ingredients such as root crops and pork.
In one of the Swedish restaurants I worked at, we used this term to describe the daily lunch specials we served. When creating these dishes, the focus was offering delicious and accessible food, nothing fancy, that was still very thoughtful.
And more often than not, served with lots of flavoured butter.
Swedes absolutely love their butter (particularly brown butter), and the amounts they gladly accepted on their food remains nothing less than impressive to me.
Crispy chicken with chicken skin butter
The dish I’m sharing today is a very comforting example of the kind of husmanskost we served our lunch guests back in Stockholm.
The recipe is for chicken breast coated in crispy panko breadcrumbs served with a very rich, incredibly flavoursome butter blended with roasted chicken skin.
First, let’s start with that chicken skin butter.
Chicken skin butter
When I plan to cook with chicken nowadays, I tend to buy a whole chicken. I feel like there are so many benefits to doing this over buying just breasts or thigh. For one thing, having the whole bird gives me the wings and carcass for stock. It also guarantees I get that oh so tender little nugget called the oyster that lives tucked under the chicken that normally gets lost when buying pre-cut thighs.
For the benefit of this recipe, though, getting the whole bird sees that I get all of the skin (not always included on breasts where I live). And though the skin does make for a cheeky chef’s treat or is delicious cooked on the breast, I hope to show you how saving it to make this butter will leave you with a product that can boost the flavour of all kinds of dishes.
First, let’s go through the steps to make it…
Ingredients
Skin from the breasts and thighs of a chicken
120g salted room temp butter
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
If you’re using a pack of chicken thighs and breasts, getting the skin from them will be a few seconds’ work. If you have a whole chicken, you will of course have to joint it first. I plan on making my own walkthrough for this in the future, but if you’re not sure how to do it, check out this link to my old culinary school’s picture guide.
Once you have the skin removed, lay it flat on some baking paper and roast in an oven at 150°c/300°f. Cook it at this heat for about 40 minutes. This slightly gentler roast assures you cook out all the moisture and render the fat before it colours too much. Once the skin has dried out and fat rendered (after about 40 mins) turn the oven up to 190°c/370°f for 5 or 10 minutes to get a deep golden brown colour.
Once out of the oven, rest them on some kitchen paper to help draw out the grease and cool down.
Once they are room temp, give them a weigh. You should have about 30 grams of roasted skin. If you had a particularly “beefy” chicken then I’d save anything over 30g as your butter would start getting really very strong. The skin/butter proportion I use is 1 part skin/4 parts butter or 30g skin 120g butter.
Add the skin to a food processor with the butter and blitz until smooth. Then add the vinegar and blitz again to bring it all together. It will probably look quite loose at this point but pop it in the fridge and it will set up nicely.
This butter is like a luxury stock cube if you want to add some roasted meaty flavour to other dishes. In the past I’ve used it to enrich paneer curries, I’ve basted whole roast cabbages and cauliflowers with it. Having made this butter again this week for the pictures, I used it the next day to fry and dress gnocchi with. Absolutely lovely stuff.
Now for the important matter of…
Crispy panko chicken breast
Ingredients
2 chicken breasts
1/2 teaspoon fine salt
1 egg
100g panko breadcrumbs
A handful or two of plain flour
Method
I have another quick tip to make this a particularly lovely piece of fried chicken for you.
A few hours before you are planning to cook, get your chicken breasts, butterfly them a little bit by cutting horizontally into the thick part of the breast and opening it out like the page of a book, then flatten gently with the palm of your hand. I like to keep my breasts pretty thick so I don’t butterfly them anymore than this.
Now here’s the important part, weigh your breasts and note the number. The last time I weighed two chicken breasts it came to about 400g. What I’d like you to try is dry brining your breasts with a quantity of .5-1% salt by weight. In more pleasant English, that means rubbing your 2 breasts with about 1/2 teaspoon of fine grain salt. Leave this for a few hours before cooking. There’s no need to rinse them.
Once your chicken’s finished dry brining, get set up with 3 plates: put the flour on one, your whisked egg on another, and finally add your panko to the other. Dip the chicken first in flour so it’s fully coated, pat off any excess, then dip this in the beaten egg, allowing the excess to drip off, and then cover in the panko. I like to push the panko in firmly to the chicken to encourage a full coating.
When you have all the chicken breadcrumbed, I like to leave it in the fridge uncovered in a single layer on a plate. This isn’t 100% necessary, but I do I find this helps set the coating, dry it out a bit, and ultimately achieve a better golden colour once we are frying.
Put your oven to 180°c/350°f
I find shallow frying the most straightforward technique for cooking this at home. Add about 2 cm of oil into your frying pan and put it to a medium/high heat. The oil should cover the half of the breast placed down in the oil leaving the top half raised above. The chicken should very much sizzle the moment it touches the oil or the oil is too cold. Fry the breasts one at a time for 3 or 4 minutes on one side, then the same on the other, until a deep golden brown. If your chicken turns golden brown quicker than this then the oil was too hot, but it’s really not a big deal. Just remove the chicken when it’s the desired colour as we’ll be finishing it in the oven anyway.
While you are cooking the second breast, I put the first on a kitchen paper lined plate.
When the second is fried, I then put both in the oven to cook through fully and come back up to heat for about 5 minutes or so (this pan then oven technique really comes into its own when you’re cooking more than 2). I test the internal temp with a little skewer, but if you’d prefer just cut into the thickest area to check it’s cooked.
Thanks to the brining stage, you’ll find the chicken very moist and tender. The process even helps protect the meat from overcooking. And of course, it will be really nicely seasoned throughout (hence my not seasoning the flour and breadcrumbs earlier).
I serve this with an elegant dollop of the butter on top, boiled waxy potatoes tossed in fresh herbs like dill and chives, a salad dressed with a sharp vinaigrette, and a generous wedge of lemon.
This really is a taste of how I remember Swedish lunchtimes.
This newsletter is almost a year old now and along with my ongoing memoir posts, my recipe content has grown to include this honey yoghurt cake, a way of cooking salmon on a plank, and these very special mille-feuille potatoes. There’s lots more to come in 2024. If you can help support my work here for the equivalent of just $2.50 a month, please purchase an annual subscription today. It really helps!
Thanks for Joining me again this week. In Finnish, December is called Joulukuu, which directly translates as “Christmas month”.
I really hope your Christmas month is starting off well.
See you next time!
Wil
This why I love Substack , if you are interested / passionate about the subject then like-minded people can connect and share ideas
Another great reason to butcher a whole chicken is collecting enough offcuts ( neck fillet , skirt , parson’s nose etc) for Yakitori ! Love the chicken skin butter