Chicken with Leeks and Mustard Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Equipment Needed

• •Large, heavy-bottomed pan or skillet with a lid (cast iron or enamelled)
• •Tongs for turning the chicken

Instructions

1. 1

   Brown the chicken

   Season the chicken thighs generously with salt and pepper. Get a wide, heavy pan properly hot with the oil, then lay the thighs in skin-side down. Leave them alone. This is important. The skin needs steady, uninterrupted contact with the hot pan to render its fat and turn golden and crisp. Seven or eight minutes, perhaps longer. You'll know it's ready when the skin releases easily and has gone the colour of a good biscuit. Turn them over, give the other side two or three minutes, then lift them out onto a plate. They don't need to be cooked through. They're going back in later.

   Don't crowd the pan. If your thighs are large, do this in two batches. Crowded chicken steams instead of crisping, and then there's no saving the skin.
2. 2

   Soften the leeks

   Pour away most of the fat from the pan but keep about a tablespoon. Add the butter and let it foam. Tip in the leeks and the thyme sprigs, season with a pinch of salt, and stir everything through the butter. Drop the heat to medium-low. You want the leeks to soften slowly, collapsing into something silky and sweet. This takes ten minutes, sometimes a bit more. Stir now and then but mostly leave them be. When they smell gentle and almost buttery, add the garlic and cook for another minute until it turns fragrant but not brown.

3. 3

   Build the sauce

   Turn the heat up and pour in the wine. It will sizzle and catch on the sticky bits at the bottom of the pan, which is exactly what you want. Let it bubble until it has reduced by about half and the raw alcohol smell has gone, replaced by something rounder and more vineyard than bottle. Stir in the cream and the mustard. The mustard will mottle the cream with amber seeds. Let it come to a gentle simmer, just enough that the surface trembles.

   The mustard goes in off the boil and simmers gently from here. High heat turns wholegrain mustard bitter and kills its warmth. You want heat, not temper.
4. 4

   Return the chicken and finish

   Nestle the chicken thighs back into the pan, skin-side up, so the skin stays above the sauce and keeps its crispness. Spoon a little sauce around, not over, the thighs. Let everything simmer gently on the hob for fifteen to twenty minutes, until the chicken is cooked through and the sauce has thickened to the consistency of something you'd want to mop up with bread. The juices from the chicken should run clear when you press the thickest part. Taste the sauce. Adjust the salt. Add another spoonful of mustard if you like more heat. Scatter the parsley over the top and bring the whole pan to the table.

   Keeping the skin above the sauce is the only moment of care this dish asks for. Submerged skin goes soft and sad. Exposed skin stays golden and crisp, which is half the pleasure of the thing.

Chef Tips

• •Use bone-in, skin-on thighs. Boneless will work, but you lose the rendered fat that flavours the sauce and the crisp skin that makes the dish worth remembering. The bones give the sauce a quiet richness that cream alone can't manage.
• •Wholegrain mustard, not smooth. The seeds matter here. They carry a warmth that smooth mustard doesn't, and they look beautiful suspended in the cream like tiny, amber beads. Maille or a good English wholegrain from the jar are both fine. Use what you have.
• •This wants something plain alongside it. Mashed potato is the obvious partner, and the obvious partner is often the right one. The sauce pools into the mash and that's the whole story. A few steamed greens if you want to feel virtuous, but the plate is already complete.
• •If you haven't got white wine open, a dry vermouth from the back of the cupboard does the same job and arguably a better one. Noilly Prat has been rescuing midweek cooking for longer than anyone cares to admit.

Advance Preparation

• •The leeks can be cleaned and sliced a day ahead and kept in a bag in the fridge. A small thing, but it means the dish comes together in the time it takes to brown the chicken.
• •Leftovers keep well refrigerated for two days. Reheat gently in the pan. The sauce will have thickened overnight and the flavours will have deepened. It may need a splash of water or stock to loosen it. The skin won't be crisp any longer, but the trade-off is a sauce that tastes like it has been thinking about itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Nutrition Information

1 serving (about 320g)