Last Sunday, the Times published its version of Jamie Oliver’s Chicken in Milk recipe. It is rare that you read articles about attempts to replicate experiments (or recipes) but this is such a report.
The relatively simple recipe says that you season a whole chicken and brown it in butter and olive oil in a snug-fitting pot. We chose a 3-liter Corningware casserole. Then you drain out the fat, add a cinnamon stick and garlic cloves and brown them briefly and put the chicken back and add whole milk, sage leaves and strips of lemon peel, and bake it for about 90 minutes.
The result is supposed to be “chicken in a thick, curdled sauce.”
Here are the ingredients:
- 1 whole chicken, 3-4 lbs
- Salt and pepper
- ¼ cup butter
- ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
- 1 small cinnamon stick
- 10 cloves garlic, skins still on
- 2 ½ cups whole milk
- 1 handful fresh sage leaves (about 15-20 leaves0
- Strips of zest from 2 lemons
Perhaps because the chicken fit snugly, the milk didn’t clot or reduce much. But the flavor was terrible, dominated by way too much sage. We didn’t get any note of cinnamon and very little of the garlic flavor.
If we made it again, we’d probably use about 5-6 sage leaves, maximum, and a little bigger pot. We’d prefer to make Chicken Baked in Cream instead.
Food Science Institute 