For years the Silver Palate’s Chicken Marbella has ruled the potluck table. The easy combination of chicken thighs, prunes, olives etc. so easily assembled with so flavorful a result, won the hearts of everyone who cared about serving good food.
I predict Annie Schennum’s “Oven Baked Chicken with Ginger, Garlic and Sweet Potatoes” is about to dethrone Chicken Marbella as the potluck favorite.
In a shallow roasting pan lay out a batch of bone-in chicken thighs, always great flavor vehicles, toss over them chunks of sweet potatoes, whole cloves of garlic, rosemary leaves, and stem ginger (I’ll get to that in a moment). Sprinkle all with allspice, salt and pepper, and roast. Can you smell this yet? The recipe is like a stop on the Silk Road somewhere between Provence and Istanbul.
After the thighs are crisp and brown, the pan contents are removed to a warm platter, and a luscious sauce is made by deglazing the remains with stock and adding sour cream and mustard. Here the recipe makes a u-turn back to France. The rich mustard-nuanced sauce softens with all the flavors from the pan - the ginger, rosemary and allspice - to be a complex, sophisticated dinner that tastes like a Cordon Bleu invention.
In fact, Annie Schennum, who was born and lived most of her life in London, trained at The Cordon Bleu School, and worked there as one of the teachers. Later, Schennum was chef at the Biras Creek Hotel on Virgin Gorda, in the British Virgin Islands and at a private director’s dining room for an investment bank in the City of London, before leaving professional cooking to raise her four children. She moved from London to the North Shore of Boston in 2004, and lives in Manchester-by-the-Sea. Although The Stem Ginger Chicken reflects Schennum’s professional good taste and sense, she clipped it years ago from a magazine in an English doctor’s office.
What’s stem ginger and is there a substitute? Schennum and I had a long discussion about that. We tasted the contents of the jar she’d brought home in her luggage from Britain. We poked at a small, golden chunk, analyzed the jar contents, tasted it right out of the jar, and tasted it with the chicken. We determined it was really nothing more than one inch chunks of peeled fresh ginger cooked in a simple syrup. You can find stem ginger on line, or in Asian markets, or you can make it yourself, which, too impatient to wait for my ordered jar to arrive, I successfully did. The recipe follows.
For its ratio of ease to flavor, Schennum’s family long ago dubbed this recipe a “Weekday Winner.” I think it wins on the weekends, too.
Ginger Chicken Thighs with Sweet Potatoes
serves 4-6
Ingredients
8 chicken thighs, trimmed of excess skin
2 sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into eight pieces each
8 cloves garlic, peeled
2 tablespoons olive oil
I-2 pieces stem ginger, finely chopped
1 tablespoon stem ginger syrup
2 small sprigs fresh Rosemary, leaves only
¼ teaspoon ground allspice
½ cup chicken broth
¼ cup sour cream
1 level tablespoon Dijon mustard
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Instructions
Preheat oven to 400º F
Put chicken, sweet potatoes, garlic and rosemary leaves into a shallow roasting pan, previously greased with I tablespoon of olive oil. Ensure the pan is sized so the ingredients fit quite snugly.
Drizzle over the remaining tablespoon of oil
Scatter the chopped stem ginger and ginger syrup over the chicken and potatoes
Season well with the allspice, salt and freshly ground black pepper
Toss well to coat
Roast for 40-45 minutes in top half of oven, basting every 15 minutes
When chicken is cooked and golden brown, remove from oven
Transfer chicken and potatoes to a serving dish, keep warm
Using a spoon, skim off surplus fat from roasting pan
Place pan over medium heat and squash the garlic cloves to a pulp
Pour in the chicken broth to de-glaze the pan and bring to a boil
Add the Dijon mustard and sour cream
Stir to combine, let it bubble for a minute, check seasoning
The sauce can then be strained at this stage and poured over the chicken or served separately
To make Stem Ginger
Ingredients
a large knob of fresh ginger, about a cup when peeled and cut into 1 inch pieces
2 cups sugar
2 cups water
Instructions
Put the sugar and water in a saucepan and bring to a simmer. When the sugar dissolves, add the peeled ginger pieces. Simmer for approximately 25 minutes. You want the syrup to penetrate the ginger’s fiber. Let cool and store the ginger and syrup together in a jar.
