Tarragon Chicken - The Gourmet Slow Cooker - Recipe #1

Slow cookers are strange beasts. Many recipes using them simply involve throwing a bunch of stuff in, switching them on, heading off to work and returning to a warm meal. Sadly, in Toasty's experience, warm is about the only positive adjective that can be applied to most of these dishes. Other adjectives he finds coming to mind are "mushy" "overcooked" and "bland".

A second breed of recipes use slow cookers essentially to replace oven casseroles in classic dishes. Generally these recipes end up tasting great, but involve significant prep such as browning meat, frying onions and celery etc. They often also involve shorter cooking times, so that they don't work well during a workday.

Anyway, "The Gournet Slow Cooker" falls squarely into the second camp. It has recipes organised by country for France, the UK, Greece, India, Italy etc, with about half a dozen recipes for each. The ingredient lists are reasonable in size and many dishes look interesting.

Based on repeated references to the dish in positive reviews of the book, and also because Mr. T is a gastronomic Francophile, Toasty chose the tarragon chicken recipe as the first thing to cook from this book. Additionally, due to a new horror of factory farming, Toasty bought a free range organic chicken and cut it into portions for the recipe. Picture large sharp knife hacking at big wet bird with tendency to skitter about the cutting surface. Mottled grey dog was VERY interested in the possibility of chicken parts falling on the floor anywhere near her muzzle.

Being thrifty, Toasty froze the gibblets and offcuts (backbone etc) to make chicken stock at a later date. We shall see what comes of that.

The final dish was a hit, with a rich and savoury sauce and very tender chicken, which was served over noodles and accompanied by oven roasted asparagus. However, the tarragon taste was a little muted for Toasty's taste. This is likely due to the amount of cream in the recipe, as cream tends to dull flavours. Similarly, Toasty thought the dish needed a little acid to to balance the sauce better, so perhaps a savignon blanc or muscadet would work better in the recipe than the chardonnay that was actually used.


Tarragon Chicken

3/4 cup plus 2 tbsp all-purpose flour

1 tsp salt

1 chicken, cut into serving pieces and skinned

2 tbps unsalted butter

2 tbsp olive oil

1 yellow onion, finely chopped

1cup dry white wine

1 cup chicken stock

6 sprigs tarragon

1 cup heavy cream

Put 3/4 cup flour in a sealable bag and coat a couple of chicken pieces at a time by shaking them around in there.

Fry the chicken in the oil and butter over a medium high heat until golden on all sides. Place in the slow cooker.

Add the onion and 2 tbsp flour to the pan. Saute for ~ 10 minutes until lightly browned. Slowly add the wine, scraping up the gooey bits stuck to the pan.

Add the stock and cook, with stirring for 10-15 minutes, until the sauce is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

Put 2 sprigs of tarragon in with the chicken and pour the onion/sauce over.

Cover and cook on low for 5-6 hrs until the chicken is just falling off the bone.

Pour in cream and cook a further 10-15 minutes.

Remove the tarragon sprigs.

Coarsely chop the remaining tarragon leaves and add to the slow cooker.

Serve immediately.