Amateur Cooking Hour: Poulet Au Paprika

Perhaps it's because I'm an amateur in all things food, but it took a couple of tries to cook the rather simple French dish, Poulet Au Paprika or Paprika Chicken. The recipe I followed came from Phaidon's I Know How To Cook, and it called for a 2 1/4 lb. chicken, butter, stock, crème fraiche and paprika.

My troubles started when I couldn’t find a chicken that was exactly 2 ¼ lbs., and I assumed that the slightly heavier poultry I purchased would need to be accompanied by more of each ingredient. So, I estimated how much more butter to include, which inadvertently led to estimating how much more stock, crème fraiche and paprika to add.

After an hour of cooking the chicken in the oven, I quickly combined the leftover stock with the remaining ingredients to make the sauce. In five minutes, the meal was served.

The result was soggy chicken drenched in a thin, white sauce. And the sauce itself tasted like stock bothered with the sourness from crème fraiche. If it weren’t for my dislike of wasting food, I would have thrown the whole thing away.

Now, there were two things learned from this experience. The first is do not estimate the measurements for ingredients, especially for a dish that you never tried cooking. The second is patience. In this case, the chicken needed to sit on the pan and brown before putting it in the oven for an hour. The sauce needed time to boil and thicken, even if it meant adding an extra 30 minutes or more to the overall cooking time.

Last Sunday, I gave cooking Poulet Au Paprika another try. This time around, I stuck with the measurements and patiently waited for the chicken skin to brown to a slight crisp and the stock to truly merge with the crème fraiche and paprika.

The end product was exactly what I expected it to be the first time around: tender chicken coated in a butter cream sauce. The sauce itself reflected the mild, smoky flavor of paprika. Delicious.