Cradock - Stuffing a chicken or turkey – or for that matter a pigeon, quail, pheasant or partridge – is not only intended to make a simple Sunday roast go further.
It’s meant to enhance the bird from within, adding flavour and moisture and preventing it from drying out in the centre… it’s a buffer of sorts, against the heat of the oven overcooking it.
So it makes little sense to prepare a stuffing exactly as you would for actually stuffing the fowl, and instead spooning it into a bread loaf tin and cooking it separately. And to do that and still call it “stuffing” is just daft, yet in pubs that serve food, particularly in the UK, stuffing made in this way is pretty standard.
I felt proper old-fashioned and pukka English this week, then, when I went all traditional on us and made the old standard – sage and onion stuffing – and, yes, actually forked it inside the cavity of a rather large chicken and roasted it. This was what my Yorkshire-bred mom used to do often on a Sunday, and it’s a meal that nourishes the soul and spirit as well as the sustenance it brings.
I think stuffing is due for a comeback. There are so many ingredients available these days from so many exotic cuisines that there are hundreds of possibilities for a professional chef or home cook fancying getting inventive in the kitchen. Nuts, spices, herbs, sauces, alcohol, almost anything is fair game as long as you get the balance right.
A shot of a liqueur, even the expensive, larney ones like Cointreau, Drambuie (those two being my favourites), Grand Marnier or Amaretto, lend a wonderful spike of flavour to a stuffing while also helping to flavour the bird you’re cooking. But more affordable liqueurs such as the creamier Baileys, Cape Velvet or Amarula Cream can have a great effect too.
If you’re going for a liqueur-enhanced stuffing, I’d also go the nutty route, and maybe use mushrooms as well. I’d add some spice, a herb or two to give it breadth, and a little crunch from, say, celery or baby fennel. Imagine a stuffing containing both toasted almonds and Amaretto di Saronno – heaven. Or leave the almonds out of the stuffing, toasting them and scattering over the chicken once served. It would double as a garnish.
You could go Italian in a different way, simmering down onions and garlic and adding lots of chopped, very ripe and flavourful tomatoes, and fresh oregano, and reduce that slowly to deeply intensify the flavour. Throw in a glass of marsala and simmer that down too. Then add lots of chopped fresh basil along with the breadcrumbs, spoon it into the bird and expect exclamations of Mamma mia from your guests. I’d coat the bird’s skin in plenty of olive oil before cooking it in a hot oven to maximise the crispiness of the skin. I once had something similar cooked by an Italian chef in a pizza oven – sublime, and so tender.
For a Spanish mood, try using chopped chorizo, hot chillies and red bell pepper, garlic (of course), red onion, black olives, olive oil, and (once prepared to the same formula as the stuffing above) reduced down with a well-aged dry red wine before stuffing the chicken.
Without suggesting that this would be a “Thai stuffing” (such a method not being something likely to be done in Thailand) you could take some of the basic ingredients that make the cuisine the delight that it is, and use them to flavour an otherwise traditional stuffing – the lemongrass, basil, chilli, fish sauce, lime juice and garlic that find their way into so many Thai dishes.
All of the above can be achieved using your common sense and following a few basic rules. Begin by sautéing onions and garlic (including celery, fennel and other similar ingredients that benefit from being simmered in oil to soften them), then adding the liquified ingredients and simmering them down so that you don’t have too much moisture. The stuffing, once you’ve added breadcrumbs, needs to hold itself together once inside the chicken or other fowl. If you’re using nuts, toast them briefly by tossing them in a dry pan on a derate heat, and add them with the breadcrumbs. If using mushrooms, quarter them and cook on a high heat in olive oil, stirring all the time until they release their own juices, then add a splash of lemon juice and reduce the remaining liquid away. This makes them deliciously nutty.
But I went all traditional this week and made the British classic of a sage and onion stuffing.
Roast chicken with sage and onion stuffing
1 medium onion
2 cloves garlic
Butter
Handful fresh sage, washed and finely chopped
1 glass dry white wine
Salt and pepper to taste
3 slices day-old white bread
1 medium chicken
Olive oil
Not every British sage and onion stuffing – certainly until recent decades – would have included garlic, which was regarded with suspicion and curled lips by many of my parents’ generation.
But the changes they have a-been wrung, to slightly bastardise Mr Dylan, so I simmered onion and garlic together in butter until they were soft and translucent, then added lots of finely chopped sage, a glass of wine, salt and pepper to taste and allowed it to reduce on a moderate heat, stirring. I crumbled in the bread and combined it with a wooden spoon.
Season the bird inside with salt and pepper, stuff it good and proper (you can try trussing it if you like but I didn’t bother and the stuffing didn’t fall out while cooking), season the bird all over on the outside, drizzle olive oil all over and roast in a 190ºC oven until the juices run clear with pierced with a skewer. About 75 to 90 minutes.
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