RCP: Chicken in tomato-herb sauce w/red pepper pasta

[Jenise]

Last night's dinner, and a keeper, was this delicious pan full of scallops of boneless, skinless chicken breast, lightly finished in a tomato-herb pan sauce that comes together in just about the time it takes to boil water for some pasta to serve it over. And though any pasta will do, I like the flavor and color compliment of red bell pepper spaghetti.

IMG_1130.JPG

2 chicken breasts, cut diagonally into half inch slices
1 large shallot, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 medium sized fresh red tomatoes, diced
4 tblsp flour
2 tblsp chopped fresh rosemary
2 tblsp chopped fresh basil (or 2 tsp dry)
salt
1.5 cups chicken broth
1/2 cup half and half or 1 big dollop of sour cream
Fresh ground black pepper
cayenne pepper
olive or vegetable oil

Sprinkle salt over chicken pieces, dredge in flour (reserve after use, you're going to thicken your sauce with it), then place in hot skillet with oil to lightly brown, about 1-2 minutes per side. Remove chicken pieces to a plate. Now put your pasta water on to boil.

Back to the sauce, add a little more oil if necessary, then lightly sweat the shallots and garlic, adding the tomatoes and herbs after the shallots turn a little transluscent. Now add back and incorporate the remaining flour, and add the chicken broth. Bring to a boil, stirring, then add the half and half or sour cream, cayenne and black pepper. Reduce to a simmer.

Cook the pasta. About three minutes before the pasta will be ready to drain, add the chicken pieces back to the sauce to heat through and finish cooking. Spoon chicken and sauce over pasta.

IMG_1133.JPG

Looks nice. If I were to make this, I think I would add crushed red pepper to the garlic and shallot and skip the cayenne. Is the pasta made with red peppers?

Looks like the pasta loses it's color during the cooking? I've used colored pasta before but can't recall much about it. I do have a recipe for making red bell pepper pasta, but it comes out sort of an rusty orange color. Recipe sounds very good.

[Jenise]

Looks nice. If I were to make this, I think I would add crushed red pepper to the garlic and shallot and skip the cayenne. Is the pasta made with red peppers?

Yes, the pasta is flavored with red peppers, and it was purchased that way at an Italian deli. It's a common product in Italian specialty grocers, has a name like pepperoncini but I don't think that's quite right.

[Jenise]

Looks like the pasta loses it's color during the cooking? I've used colored pasta before but can't recall much about it. I do have a recipe for making red bell pepper pasta, but it comes out sort of an rusty orange color. Recipe sounds very good.

Yes, it did lost a bit of color, but I think the flash on my camera blanched it out even more.

Jenise said:

"Last night's dinner, and a keeper, was this delicious pan full of scallops of boneless, skinless chicken breast, lightly finished in a tomato-herb pan sauce that comes together in just about the time it takes to boil water for some pasta to serve it over."

I had a look at the recipe,and it seemed to be within my skill level. Add to that the "and a keeper" recommendation, and I had to try it. I did, this evening.

I made some changes that would probably cause a foodie to shudder. I used boneless, skinless chicken thighs because I like the flavor better; I used canned, diced tomatoes because that's what I had and in my part of the country and at this time of the year fresh tomatoes are utterly hopeless; I used minced garlic from a jar; and because red bell pepper spaghetti is entirely out of my experience, I added a heaping tablespoon of finely diced sweet green pepper to hopefully make up the difference. I took Howie's advice and added red pepper flakes instead of cayenne. From my point of view, if I did any real violence to Jenise' recipe it was leaving out the rosemary entirely. I didn't have any and wasn't about to go out to get some.

Jenise is right, this is a keeper, even without the rosemary. .

You did exactly what I plan on doing Alan.... I love red bell pepper sauce with pasta and was planning on charring the peppers, removing the skin then giving them a puree to go into the canned tomato sauce, cause no tomato available now is going to give a better flavor than those yummy San Marzanos. I will use fresh garlic, because there is something about whacking those fat cloves that is addicting for me! It sounds like good stuff and any riff will be tasty.

[Jenise]

Okay, Karen and Alan:

Play with the recipe indeed, that's what it's there for. It's your dinner and you should follow whatever inspires you to cook! That said, some comments:

Thighs would of course taste great in this--I love thigh meat too. But Alan, I would suggest you consider using breast meat sometime just to find out how good and tender it can be when cut and cooked just right--just to doneness and not one second more--delicate and tender and a good canvas for the complex sauce.

About tomatoes: Karen, I have to politely disagree. This is a quick pan sauce, and the hot house tomatoes available in grocery stores right now (and what I used) are perfect for the dish. They contain a lot of juice, and the fresh skin holds the diced fruit in perfect whole little square jewels of piquance, which sweeten when heated while the inner flesh dissolves into, and informs, the sauce. Great as canned Marzanos are for long cooked sauces, fresh is really better here. If using canned is a must, then select the canned diced tomatoes which are yes already cooked but much more lightly so and therefore have more integrity than a typical whole canned tomato. This is not a tomato sauce per se, it's an herb sauce with tomatoes.

And about cayenne or more to the point powdered red pepper of any stripe vs. red pepper flakes: I use a lot of both, but favor red pepper flakes in a sauce where the visible flakes add a pleasant rusticity AND in braises where long cooking is going to develop their flavor. Neither was the goal with this sauce: in a quick pan sauce, cayenne is going to give you the most instant and manageable heat. I didn't specify how much because the jar of cayenne or similar "red pepper" you have in your pantry could well be twice or half as hot as what I used, and too your taste for same might be different than mine. The jar I have now is actually surprisingly mild, and half a teaspoonish (I measure in the palm of my hand) only gave it a light kick. And a light kick was what I was looking for--the ultimate goal here was sophistication, not rusticity, without going so far as refinement, which would have required putting the sauce in a blender to homogenize the ingredients into a complexly flavored but visually one-dimensional result. If you don't have powdered, by all means use flakes, you just don't get a quick a result and more heat can show up than you bargained for in the finished dish.

Anyway, hope the explanations help.

Thanks for explanation, Jenise. I'm certain you are correct and am equally certain that I'm not going to question your expertise. With respect to sophistication vs rusticity, I expect that almost all my culinary efforts qualify as rustic.

Great explanation Jenise...I will make it as you wrote it and see how it goes. Although I do make quick tomato sauces with canned tomatoes in winter and I don't think they need the long cooking you mentioned, to make a good sauce. Sometimes my tweaking makes things more complicated....

[Jenise]

Great explanation Jenise...I will make it as you wrote it and see how it goes. Although I do make quick tomato sauces with canned tomatoes in winter and I don't think they need the long cooking you mentioned, to make a good sauce. Sometimes my tweaking makes things more complicated....

Well, just a further point of clarity, that what I meant is not that the canned tomatoes need long cooking, but that they're already long-cooked in the canning process. Which is why fresh, which haven't been cooked at all, are better.