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- [Announcer] The following episode of, "Charlotte Cooks," is brought to you by Central Piedmont Community College and viewers like you.

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- Coming up on this episode of, "Charlotte Cooks," we're using some beautiful chicken thighs and some herbs to make an absolutely delicious dish.

(lively music) Welcome to this edition of, "Charlotte Cooks."

I'm Chef Pamela Roberts and today I'm gonna show you how to make a really simple marinade for some chicken thighs.

We're gonna saute them, we're gonna get 'em nice and golden brown.

I'm gonna show you how to make some braised green beans with some nice toasted almonds.

And we're gonna put this beautiful dish together.

It is so easy and it's delicious.

You can do this any weeknight and still put your feet up.

All right, so what we're gonna do first is we're gonna make a marinade for our chicken thighs.

Now when you are doing chicken, you wanna make sure that you're not gonna marinate it longer than an hour.

And so what I'm going to do is gonna take a half a cup of oil and I'm gonna put some oil in this.

And when you make a marinade y'all, y'all really should use some oil in it because it helps to take the herbs and the aromatics like your garlic and your shallots, and it helps those flavors go in just a little bit deeper.

We're gonna use some white wine vinegar.

You can use any white wine vinegar you want.

If you wanted to use a red wine vinegar, you could.

Because we are using chicken thighs, the meat's dark anyway, and so having a little bit of the red wine in there is not gonna really make that much of a difference.

But if you use balsamic vinegar, you gotta make sure that you are understanding that it is going to have a coloring aspect to the meat when it gets cooked and marinated.

It's gonna look a little darker than it should.

All right, so we have some white wine vinegar, a little bit of oil.

We are also gonna add a little bit of water in there.

Equal parts of vinegar and water, so that the vinegar isn't too acidic.

Once again, we want that acid to pull out the flavors of not only the herbs and the rest of the marinade, but we also want it to add a little bit of texture liquidy aspect to the marinade, so that it gets well into that chicken.

Now I'm gonna be using some salt free herb blends because I like being able to control my salt.

And so all I'm going to do is sprinkle some of this in here.

You can use whatever you like.

This one is a garlic and herb and this one is an onion and herb.

And I'm gonna put a little bit of shallot and a little bit of garlic in here as well.

So you can choose whichever one that you like, all right?

I like the salt free 'cause once again, I can control the salt.

On my garlic, I'm going to take my garlic, I'm gonna set this aside.

I'm gonna take my garlic and all I'm going to do is take one clove of garlic and we're gonna take it and we're gonna cut the end off, get all of this little skin off and we're gonna put it on a microplane.

And the microplane, tap it gently and that's gonna crack the skin, so you can get that off really easily, okay?

So then a microplane is like an old wood rasp.

It's nice and fine.

It creates a really fine paste.

And you could use this if you had a microplane, you could use it for a lot of different things.

You can use it for garlic, you can use it for shallots, you can use it for chocolate, you can use it for ginger, you can use it for nutmeg, you can use it for a lot of different things.

So we're just gonna pop that in there.

And see how it comes off?

All nice and fine like this.

It's beautiful, isn't it?

So, that's our garlic.

I'm gonna put our garlic in there.

But I'm gonna also do a shallot, so I'm gonna leave that there.

And the shallot's gonna help push that garlic out some as well.

So on our shallots, we have some nice fresh shallots.

These are beautiful shallots.

And so when you cut a shallot open, guys, you're gonna find you get not just one, but shallots almost always come in two units, okay?

And so if you wanted to, you can sprout those little roots and have another shallot plant growing or not.

We just cut it up and use it.

Shallots are like a nice sweet onion.

Sometimes they can be nice and strong.

So if you smell 'em and they smell really strong like a really hot onion, then you can reduce them, the amount that you use a little bit.

Or you can just use it and just be aware that you have a very strong onion.

If I don't have red onion, sometimes I'll go ahead and I'll substitute shallot.

So once again, I'm just gonna put a little bit of shallot in this marinade, just gonna rub it onto my microplane.

That's gonna help push all that other garlic out.

And we're going to get some nice shallot in there as well.

So after you get all your ingredients in, you're gonna take a nice little whisk and you're gonna whisk it all up.

And it doesn't have to be very much.

You're not trying to swim your chicken in this liquid, you just wanna give it enough liquid to coat it all up, so it will actually just coat and marinate.

So we're gonna use a plastic bag.

Why are we gonna use a plastic bag?

Because in a bowl sometimes things get in the bottom.

In a plastic bag, you can make sure that your thighs are going to be totally covered.

Now make sure you got your skin flaps.

These are bone in chicken thighs.

I wanna have my skin flaps, but I wanna open them up so this meat gets all nice and marinated, okay?

So throw these into the marinade bag.

See how I'm opening them up?

'Cause if I didn't, we wouldn't get the marinade in there.

And this is all the goody part that we wanna get nice and tasty.

So there we go.

Now we just take our marinade, give it another little whisk.

And now we're gonna pour it into the bag just enough to coat.

I'm gonna go ahead and put it all that in there.

Make sure you get all the goodies, 'cause sometimes because this isn't emulsified, it will sink.

Seal it up nice and tight.

Now here's something that I like to do when I'm doing my marinades in a zippy bag.

So if I leave it in a zippy bag like this, the liquid is gonna be on the bottom.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to slide the zip over almost two thirds of the way, and then I'm going to squeeze like this.

Squeeze the bag, push it down, and try to get as much of that air out as possible, so that your chicken is going to be actually down in that marinade.

So you're gonna massage it up a little bit and then we're going to cover it up and put this in a bowl or on a sheet pan or something in the refrigerator.

I wouldn't put this in the refrigerator just like this because if you don't have your sealed up all the way, you're gonna have all this lovely chicken juice go all over your refrigerator.

So make sure you put it on something that if it doesn't sealed up all the way, you're gonna catch those drips and leaks.

One hour, no longer, and then we're good to go.

Before we cook them, we've gotta dry these off because what we wanna do is we wanna make sure we get a nice golden brown on the skin.

And you can't do that if the skin is wet, okay?

So, here we go.

We are going to lay these out on some paper towels, take them out.

Now this is where we're gonna reshape our chicken thighs.

We're gonna take them.

We're gonna take this beautiful little skin flap and we're gonna roll them up and we're gonna make 'em into little nice chicken thigh shapes, okay?

This is where you do not want it all splayed out all over the place.

You wanna bring 'em together and you wanna bring 'em into a nice tight little bundle.

And if you've got a little piece of string, skin like that, just tuck it in, 'cause sometimes that skin gets really tasty.

I don't know about you, but I think chicken skin tastes pretty good when it's nice and crispy, okay?

So I've gotta wash my hands after this because this is kind of a messy job.

All right, get them in here.

And one more.

Get it nice and shaped the way we want it and then we're gonna dry them off, all right?

Let me wash my hands.

Now what do you do with this?

Throw it away.

Why?

'Cause it's got raw chicken blood in it.

You're not gonna use that for anything.

Don't heat it up in a pan, don't make it into a sauce.

Throw it away.

If you wanna make a sauce outta that marinade, make a fresh marinade and make that sauce from that fresh marinade.

We have our chicken thighs that are draining here on the paper towel.

And so we wanna get the skin dried off too.

So once again, take your paper towel and we're just gonna blot all of this moisture off of our chicken.

While we're doing this, we're gonna heat up our pan.

Now I'm using a cast iron skillet.

You can certainly use any kind of pan that you'd like or that you have.

I love cast iron.

I think cast iron gives a nice heat and it gives a really, really, really nice sear on whatever meat you put into the pan.

So you wanna make sure your pan gets good and hot.

You wanna make sure your chicken is all nice and dried off.

And at this point too, this is where you are going to look and make sure that you have your skin covering all of your chicken.

So just take your fingers and push it, make sure that it's got a good cover on it and you've got good shaped chicken.

So now we did not put any salt or pepper into our marinade.

We just used the salt-free thing.

So if you did put salt in your marinade, you're not gonna do this step.

But I didn't, and I really like salting my food before I put it in the saute pans.

So I'm gonna use a little bit of salt and pepper because salt and pepper are some of the best seasonings you can find.

My pan is nice and hot.

How do I know my pan is nice and hot?

Because when I put my hand over it, I'm not gonna put my hand down on it.

So we're going to put it down service side first, which is the plate, when you put it on your plate, you want it to put that pretty side down in the pan first.

So we're gonna put this skin side down.

I'm gonna take it, put a little oil in the pan.

Now when we're putting the oil in the pan, guys, we are not looking for oil to fry these just enough to coat the bottom of the pan, okay?

Now you see how the the chicken wants to fall apart like this.

And that's okay, but I'm using the edge of the cast iron skillet to help hold that piece of chicken together a little bit.

And I'll show you what I mean by that.

Put that over here.

I'm gonna put this one over here.

And I did this one upside down.

I'm sorry, there we go.

That way.

And then we're gonna do this one over here.

Use the edge of that pan to get your skin seared, so it's gonna stay in place.

We're gonna let this go until the chicken is nice and golden brown.

And so while we're doing this, we're going to go ahead and get our garlic and our onions ready.

So I'm gonna get my shallot ready.

You can use the rest of the other shallot that you had or you can just cut another one.

But all I'm gonna do here is I just want to do some shallots that are gonna go into the sauce that we could spoon over the chicken thighs when we serve them.

And so you can do it in a dice, you can put 'em on the microplane, but we're not gonna see very much of that.

So what I wanna do is go ahead and just make nice thin rings here, okay?

So I'm just gonna slice the nice little rings and these will all fall apart really nicely when we saute them.

Now, when you're cooking chicken, guys, one of the things you wanna do is make sure it's thoroughly cooked.

And this is why I like the braise because the braised does a beautiful job of it.

So, almost.

Pick them up and take a look.

Almost, almost.

There we go.

There's one.

Look at that.

Isn't that gorgeous?

Nice, even crisp, golden brown.

Now we wanna protect that crispiness too.

So when we're done with this, we wanna, when we're putting the braise and liquid in here, we're not gonna cover these things with liquid.

Okay, so what we're doing here is we are browning the bottom side now.

And so once these are browned on the bottom, we're gonna remove these from the pan, okay?

And while these are browning, I'm gonna finish up my garlic.

I'm gonna grab a clove of garlic over here.

I'm gonna cut the trim off, take the skin off of them.

And then I'm going to take this and just smash it.

I'm not going to put this on the microplane 'cause I want this garlic just to release the sweetness and not necessarily being put on the plates, okay?

So for your garlic by the edge of your cutting board, take your knife, sharp side away from you, down.

Give it a little smash.

Once again, sharp side away from you.

Give it a little smash.

That's all you wanna do here, okay?

Next.

These little guys over here are going to be ready to go.

Nice little golden brown on the bottom.

These are not cooked.

They are not cooked.

You see you got the golden brown on the bottom, got the golden brown on top.

So while our pan is nice and hot, we're going to take our shallots and garlic and throw them in.

Now we're gonna get these a saute.

We're gonna get these wilted.

And once they're wilted, we are going to deglaze this pan.

So we have enough fat in here.

We got a little bit of extra fat from the chicken skin, and we have the fat from our oil.

And we are not looking for anything other than just a little wilt on this.

Add a little bit of salt to help bring the moisture out of those shallots.

We can deglaze this with chicken stock, which is kind of plain.

We can deglaze this with white wine, which is really nice.

If you didn't wanna use alcohol in this, there is a product out there that is made by the wine industry and it's called verjus.

And what verjus is, it's a non-alcoholic wine.

It wouldn't drink it, but it's made for cooking.

It doesn't have salt in it, but it has a tremendous amount of beautiful fruity flavor.

So what I'm going to do is pour this into the pan, but I do have to tell you, because it's not alcoholic, you don't have to remove your pan from the heat like you do if you're putting alcohol in.

So I wanna get a little bit of verjus in here.

And that's gonna deglaze the pan.

Look at that beautiful bubble.

And that's gonna reduce just ever so slightly and concentrate its flavor.

Now we put the chicken back in the pan, all right?

Put this chicken back in the pan.

And so when this is reduced, we don't want it to reduce down to nothing.

We're gonna add some chicken stock.

When you're pouring in your chicken stock, don't wanna fill it up, just about halfway.

We've got our liquid in here now.

We've got it up to a simmer.

You don't want it to boil.

You wanna bring it to a boil, reduce your heat, so it simmers.

And this is a really nice little simmer here.

Now you can do this in the oven.

If you want to finish this in the oven, 350 degrees, pop it in, or you can leave it on the top of your range if you want to.

We can keep an eye on it.

Either way, a braise is done either on the oven, in the oven, or on the stove top.

So, either way.

Now we're gonna braise some green beans.

Green beans need to have a little bit of tenderizing done to them.

You can steam them.

Braising is really a nice way of doing it.

So one of the things that we're going to do is we're gonna turn our heat on.

We're gonna use a little bit of butter in our pan.

And the butter is going to add some moisture to our pan.

We are going to let this butter melt.

We're going to add some green beans to this.

Now, once again, with liquid, when you're braising your green bean, I would not wanna do anything really exotic like pineapple juice or coconut milk or anything like that, unless of course you wanted to make a coconut green bean.

But we are just going to use either some simple water or some chicken stock.

And because we're having a chicken dish here, we can certainly add chicken stock and it's gonna add some nice flavor to it.

So we're gonna get our beans in the pan, we're gonna coat them with the butter.

And once they're all coated with the butter, we're gonna add a little bit of our liquid.

And so for our liquid, I am gonna use a little bit of chicken stock because we are using some chicken thighs today.

So here we go.

Drop that in.

Now once again, notice the moisture level.

The moisture level only comes up about halfway.

You can use two thirds but never covering, okay?

So that means we're gonna have to stir these a little bit and make sure that they get nice and braised.

You're gonna see the color change.

I actually like my green beans to have a little bit of a bite to them, a little bit of an al dente bite to them.

A little bit of salt and a little bit of pepper.

And now, while these are braising, I'm gonna slide this to the back.

You guys have heard of green beans almondine before?

Well, this is how we're gonna do our almonds for this.

'Cause once this liquid is all reduced out of the braise back here, we're gonna be left with some nice butter.

And when that butter is there and all the liquid is gone, we're gonna take our toasted almonds and stir them in there, add a little bit more butter for a glaze, and we're gonna have a beautiful, beautiful green bean almondine.

And so what we do here is take your dry saute pan, nothing in it, just a dry saute pan.

Can take your sliced almonds and pop them in here.

Now sometimes if you toss them up and down like this in a bowl, all the little bits go down to the bottom of the bowl, then you can just take your top parts because those little tiny bits will burn faster than your slices.

And so, that's just something you might wanna do.

Now in your dry saute pan, here's where you get to have fun, guys.

Toss it back and forth until they're toasted, okay?

Just a dry saute pan.

If you add any oil to it, you're not gonna be able to toss it.

So when you toss it, you slide it forward, and then just bring it back.

If you wanna practice this, one good way of practicing this is just to put a piece of toast or piece of bread in here and flip the bread until it's evenly toasted on both sides.

That's gonna give you a lot of practice on how to do that flip.

And if you wanna impress your friends, like, "Oh wow, you got some really good cooking skills," learn how to flip because flipping is fun, okay?

Let's flip it like this.

And if you try this at home and you start, you're gonna end up with stuff all over your kitchen when you begin, but you'll eventually get the hang of it.

So once they're golden brown and toasted.

It doesn't take very long because you're in a dry saute pan.

You gonna see a nice little golden brown.

And here's the king.

Don't leave them in this pan because this pan is hot.

And what has this pot just done?

It has cooked these almonds.

So you need to get them out of this pan so that that cooking stops, okay?

All right.

And then put this pan where it can get washed.

Turn off your heat so you don't get burned.

Watch your beans.

So you wanna look and you wanna see that your liquid is almost gone.

You could see in the bottom it's kind of thickish.

And this is really the butter that's left, okay?

So now you can turn this heat off, you could stir in your almonds and just coat your beans with the almonds.

Turn your heat off, keep them warm until we're ready to plate, okay?

So now over here, let me show you how you're going to test your chicken doneness, okay?

So we have a thermometer.

So you're gonna insert the thermometer.

Now, you don't wanna hit the bone, you wanna go beside the bone.

If you hit the bone, you're tempering the bone, and the bone is not gonna be 165 degrees.

So you go right beside the bone and you wanna make sure that it reads 165 degrees.

It has to hold that temperature for 15 seconds.

So if it hits it and it goes up, you're good.

And some of our temperatures go up to 170 and all that.

That's totally all right, because that means your chicken is cooked.

So now to finish our sauce, we're gonna take our chicken thighs out of the pan and we are going to add a little bit of butter.

And you can take a little bit of butter and whisk this in.

And what this is going to do is it's gonna add a richness to this sauce that's gonna make it like a gravy without having to add a lot of flour.

And that old traditional stuff of adding a roo and all that.

Sometimes that's just a lot of empty calories.

And here, if you just add a little bit of butter to this verjus and the chicken stock you have here, that's all you need for a sauce.

Voila, he's done.

So now we're gonna turn this off.

We are going to plate.

We have a risotto.

Now you can make a risotto, you can make a rice, you can make a couscous, any kind of potato that you want to.

This can go with any kind of starch that you want.

So we're just gonna take a little bit of this risotto, and we are going to put some of this on the plate.

And we are going to add our chicken thigh.

I wanna put our chicken thighs like right up on it, okay?

Cantilever it up like this, okay?

And the reason I do that... We can pull this off.

The reason I do this is because I want those chicken juices to go into that rice and really make it super, super, super yummy.

I'm gonna take a nice spoon and I'm gonna come over here to my sauce and I'm gonna spoon some of this sauce directly onto my plate.

All right, now, I would not put this sauce over the top of your chicken.

Why not?

Because we have that nice, crispy skin and we wanna keep it that way, okay?

So, now we have this.

I'm gonna wipe this little dribble off here.

We're going to take our green beans with your almonds.

And I like my green beans long because I think they make a nice dramatic presentation.

Put them on the back, kind of hanging over the top of your chicken and then swirl your sauce around., so there's sauce in front, sauce in back, and our risotto.

And if you wanted to put some herbs on there, you certainly could because we have some herbs inside of there.

So it was very easy to do.

Very simple, very straightforward.

We can use the same technique on both chicken and on vegetables.

So thank you for watching this episode of, "Charlotte Cooks."

And if you wanna get our recipes, you can get 'em off of our website at pbscharlotte.org, and we're gonna catch you next time on, "Charlotte Cooks."

Thank you for watching.

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