Kitchen RO

Braised chicken with cream and mushrooms

Twenty-five minutes on the hob. Properly browned mushrooms give so much flavour that you barely notice the missing salt.

30 min total 15 min hands-on 6.54 in totalhobchickenquick
Portions
Quantities and the shopping list are recalculated
2

One portion

1,192
kcal
33
protein g
107
fat g
17
carbs g
Sodium510 mg / 667
Potassium1,202 mg / 1,567
Phosphorus480 mg / 400
Fibre7 g / 7

Against one meal out of three, at your daily targets. For fibre a full bar is the good thing; for the rest it's the opposite.

Ingredients

Meat
  • 380 g Chicken thighs
Vegetables
  • 250 g Mushrooms
  • 120 g Onions
  • 2 pcs Garlic
  • 250 g Green beans
  • 10 g Parsley
Sauce
  • 240 ml Double cream
  • 10 g Mustard · sodium
Fat and seasoning
  • 20 g Lard
  • 42 g Butter
  • 2 g Thyme
  • 1.5 g Salt · sodium
  • 1 g Black pepper

How it's made

7 steps

Big screen, one step at a time, with timers. The screen stays awake.

  1. Bone the thighs with a small knife — two minutes — and cut the meat into wide strips. Quarter the mushrooms and finely chop the onion. Pat the chicken dry.
    5 min
  2. Big pan on high heat, lard in, then the mushrooms in a single layer. Don't touch them for 4 minutes and don't salt them — salt pulls the water out and they boil instead of browning.
    4 min
    A browned mushroom has ten times the flavour of a boiled one. This is the step that replaces salt.
  3. Stir them once and give them 2 more minutes, until the edges are brown. Lift them onto a plate.
    2 min
  4. Same pan, 20 g of butter and the chicken. Brown 3 minutes on one side, 2 on the other. Add the onion and garlic, 2 minutes more.
    7 min
  5. Tip the frozen green beans straight from the bag over the chicken, stir, and give it 3 minutes on medium heat to thaw and drive the water off.
    3 min
  6. Mushrooms back in, then the cream, mustard, thyme and pepper. Low heat, 6 minutes, never boiling — cream at a hard boil splits.
    6 min
  7. Heat off, add the rest of the butter and the salt. Stir gently, scatter the parsley, done.

The fastest dish in the plan and the only one done start to finish on the hob, no oven.

The mushrooms are the trick. Browned properly, they produce natural glutamate — the same compound that makes salt and meat taste more intense. A pan of brown mushrooms does more for flavour than two grams of salt.

Double cream at 48%, not single. It’s half the recipe: 240 ml bring over 1100 calories with only 5 g of protein. Single cream at 20% would bring less than half that and would need twice the volume to make the same sauce. Being fattier, it also splits far less easily.

Mustard, not salt. Ten grams of Dijon bring acidity, bitterness and a little sodium exactly where you taste them: in the sauce. The same amount of sodium spread through the whole dish would do nothing.

Photo: Chicken in mushroom sauce by Ruth and Dave, licence BY 2.0.