Chestnut Stuffed Four Story Hills Farm Chicken with Celery and Honey Poached Cranberries

Ok, I work in Cambridge England so there’s no way to get ‘Four Story Hills Farm Chicken’ for this specific recipe. However, I am using free-range, locally grown chicken sourced from our friends at Charnwood Fayre. This recipe calls for a few hard to get items. Transglutaminase (AKA food glue) is used to ‘glue’ the chicken legs and mousse together; I was able to source this from Infusions in Bury St Edmunds for £60.00 a kilo! The mousse does not contain any eggs but uses polyphosphate to bind the ingredients. I was not able to find this and substituted Sucro from the El Bulli range of emulsifiers. Banyuls, a port vinegar is mixed with honey to glaze the cranberries, I was unable to get this and used sherry vinegar instead. We also substituted mascarpone for the crème fraiche used in the mousse, it tastes better.

Two boned out chicken legs are filled with a chicken breast mousse containing chestnuts, chives and brunoise (small diced vegetables) and vacuum packed flat. They are then cooked sous vide at 64 C for one hour. I don’t know about you but I find the temp a little low and the mousse looked slightly under cooked the first time we tried this. We now cook this at 70 degrees for a little over one-hour and are happy with the results.

The chicken is then taken out of the bag, trimmed nice and square and pan-fried with clarified butter. We then cut the chicken into squares and serve with glazed cranberries, glazed chestnuts, celeriac puree and small slices of celery.

The celery is very nice with this recipe, you have to trim the celery lengthwise to flatten slightly, cut on the bias and then blanch until tender. As you can see from the picture it has a great colour.

The celeriac is vacuum packed with salt and cream and then cooked sous vide at 85 C for 1½ hours then pureed in our vita-prep machine. Cooking vegetables this way retains all the flavour that would otherwise be lost during cooking and produces remarkable results. As we are serving this as part of a three course dinner we have added Anna Potatoes to round off the dish. And to finish we will reduce a little veal jus with a few cranberries and a drop on Madeira, it doesn’t need a jus but this is England and everyone expects their gravy! I will add a picture of the finished dish tomorrow evening after service.