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Warm chicken al a vinaigrette
Prepare and roast the chicken
A nice alternative for a summer's day is a roast chicken served warm with fresh herbs and shallots and a vinaigrette, rather than the obvious way which is with bread sauce with stuffings with gravies. You know on a summer's afternoon, very nice. So how we do this dish, again you take the cube of chicken, tiny bit of olive oil and just dissolve the cube to make a paste, nice and smooth, and put your rub on your roast chicken. Very simple, tiny bit of oil and this chicken is about 1.2 kilos. So I'd say approximately an hour in the oven, maybe a little bit quicker, maybe a little bit longer depending on your oven. In my opinion, chicken cooked on the bone is always more delicious. If you think of a pan fried breast of chicken it's never the same as a breast of roast chicken on the bone. It's more succulent, it's got better texture, better flavour. Here's my roast chicken, 1hour 10 minutes. Roast it and allow it to cool. It's now, I can handle it.
De-glaze the chicken and make the vinaigrette
Chop it up and on a nice summer's day you don't really need hot, hot chicken, there's something rather nice about eating something that's warm. So what we do now is, take our chicken. What I'm going to do is with my juices and my bit of sediment, is deglaze with a bit of white wine vinegar. It's like making a vinaigrette really. So take off, you see. Just chop off the knuckles, cut through the joints, take the breast off. Again there's no real recipe, just keeping it very simple, chop it up, on the platter, sprinkle with everything and there's lunch. I kind of like large chunks of a chicken. Take some shallots. Just reduce that down. So you can see it's almost becoming a bit syrupy. So you can see I've reduced my vinegar down by about two thirds so I've still got that acidity but it's not as aggressive. And a little bit of olive oil so it's about 3 to 1. So it's the roasting juices dissolved with the vinegar. And then just to finish, so there's my vinaigrette with my meat juices dissolved with the vinegar. Just very simple, no real skill required.
Finishing touches
And then let's take some parsley and there's our roast chicken with parsley and a few chives.