This recipe seemed pretty straightforward...Supremes De Volaille A Brun (Chicken Breasts Sauteed in Butter with Brown Deglazing Sauce) was just chicken breasts sauteed in butter. It reminded me of some of the first few cooking adventures I had...not quite as clearcut as Julia made it sound. Here's the story.
Preparation was easy -- the chicken was just rolled in flour and then sauteed in clarified butter. I thought the flour would all come right off in the butter but it didn't. It actually made a nice light and thin crusty coating that remained on throughout the cooking process. To sautee the chicken it was important to use clarified butter. Do you remember the discussion months ago regarding clarified butter? What??? You didn't read it? Sooooooo, disappointing. You're the only one who missed it but I'll explain again here just for you.
Butter is clarified by melting it over a relatively low heat and letting the milk solids separate out. Julia says the solids will sink to the bottom but I always find them floating on the top. The solids are skimmed off and what is left is the clarified butter. Clarified butter can be heated to a higher temperature without burning and, for this recipe, it was important to use
clarified butter to keep from getting brown spots on the chicken as it cooked. As you can see in the finished photos, it worked! The chicken was cooked the clarified butter and it ended up with a wonderful golden brown color.
What was so challenging about that, you ask? I wasn't prepared for how much butter would spatter and jump out at me and the stove and the counter and the Boeing 737 passing overhead at 30,000 feet. You think I'm kidding? No, I'm not. They're still cleaning off that airplane (at least I think they are). The chicken cooked nicely but the skillet was continually spitting out itty bitty drops of really hot butter. The top of my hand looked like it had measles because of all the red spots from the hot butter. The stove top was covered with a lovely film of clarified butter. I'm not sure what I did wrong but I can't imagine that it is always this messy to cook the chicken in this manner.
That being said, the chicken did have an absolutely awesome moist and tender texture. The only spice added was a sprinkling of black pepper. That made the simple brown deglazing sauce a perfect addition that complemented the flavor of the chicken without overwhelming it.
After the chicken was done and removed from the skillet, about 2/3 a cup of beef bouillon was added together with a heaping tablespoon of minced onion. This was boiled down and reduced until it became a little syrupy and, just like that, the sauce was ready. The nice part of this sauce is that if you change your mind at the last minute, you could just add cream with the bouillon and you'd end up with a tasty cream sauce.
There you have it. See, I told you it was easy. Easy and reallllly messy. It did taste pretty good though. Now I just have to figure out how to keep from making such a mess or my sous chef might not let me use her kitchen any more! I might need to make her a nice dessert to make up for the errors of my ways.
Let me know if you try it and if you're any neater than I was.
Bon Appetit!
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