roast chicken, yummy yummy: chocolate stout & fig-jam pan sauce

week two: Chocolate stout beer roasted chicken with fig-jam pan sauce (Inspired by a recipe from Martha Stewart Living, 2011)

If you’ve ever heard me talk about my infatuation for brie, it’s usually accompanied by my adoring love for fig spread (I’m a Damatia girl). Take those two ingredients and a box of water crackers and a glass of wine and you have one of my favorite meals! So when I saw this recipe, I just had to give it a go…

Ingredients: unsalted butter, chocolate stout beer (I used Young’s Double Chocolate stout) or any stout you can find in a can, sea salt, a spring of fresh thyme, fig jam (find it near your cheese counter), water/flour.

The prep for this chicken is really easy! Just pat it dry, rub 2 T of butter all over the skin and sprinkle it down with sea salt. Preheat the over to 450 degrees.

Open up the beer and pour 1/2 cup into a measuring cup for later and plop the sprig of thyme in the can.

Now the tricky part. This recipe calls for sticking your chicken over a can of stout beer, which just happens to come in extra large cans. So large, that a small chicken’s feet don’t reach the ground anymore like they would on a normal sized can. I’m going to go ahead and recommend that you NOT do what I did in the photo below. I tried to force my unbalanced chicken to cooperate. And while it did for the most part, I made a mess with the “prop up” containers and was scared to death everytime I touched it! I’d recommend you pour the rest of the stout into an empty 12 oz can. Maybe one you saved from drinking that Coke Zero earlier in the week? That’d make this whole process much less cumbersome than what I did!

Stick the chicken w/it’s new beer can buddy on the bottom rack in a something you can put in the oven: a cast iron skillet, a glass pyrex, a bit ‘ol deep heavy baking pan.

Cook it for 20 minutes, splash it with the juices running out, put it in for another 10, splash it again, wait 15 more minutes and splash it one last time. By now the chicken should have hit 155 degrees. Take it out of the oven (chicken balancing time!) and let it rest for 10 minutes until it hits 165 degrees. Then you can remove the beer can (throw out the beer inside) and let it sit for another 10 minutes before cutting. You’ll want to collect the juices, with the fat skimmed, for the sauce.

Now comes the extra yummy part!

Pour the reserve stout and the juices in a skillet and set the heat to medium-high. Mix 1 T of flour with a 1/4 cup of water. Once it’s simmering, add in the flour mixture and whisk it to combine for 1 minute. Add in 2 T of fig jam and whisk to combine. Simmer the sauce until it’s thick (2-4 minutes) and whisk as needed.

Then cut your chicken and serve it with the sauce!

We had ours with some vegetable samosas, which was the perfect side for the fruity sauce. The chicken was incredibly moist, and very simply cooked to accompany the wonderful sauce. And as usual, we’ve got 2 more servings of food saved as leftovers!

Is it bad that I’m already craving this sauce again? And that I’d love to have it instead of turkey/gravy at any holiday meal? Yeah… probably.