Chicken in the “hunter’s style” — In other words, cooked on the spot, possibly in the woods, with whatever game one had been fortunate enough to shoot and kill. Cacciatore usually includes tomatoes in some form, onions, herbs, peppers, mushrooms, etc. I can’t imagine carry all that in my backpack while I hunted for rabbit or wild fowl, but suspend reality for a moment… and go ahead with the spirit of “hunter’s style”. I had been fooling around with pizzas in the brick oven all afternoon, and we decided rather late in the day to make a cacciatore style dish in the remaining heat of the oven coming down from 700F and at just before dinner time roughly 450F…
First, I browned some chicken pieces in some olive oil in a frying pan and placed them in a large Spanish cazuela or clay dish. I returned the frying pan to the heat, added some sliced onions, tomato paste, mushrooms, small cherry tomatoes, peppers, olives and herbs and whatever else from the fridge that seemed to make sense. There was some leftover wine so I added say half a cup of red (can’t recall what kind) and let that simmer a bit before plonking all of that over the chicken and placing the cazuela in the oven for some 20-25 minutes to cook and for all the flavors to meld a bit more. The resulting dish was absolutely delicious, and it was so incredibly easy to make. If I had to do this again, I might add some chunks of bacon as well.
9 Responses
Everything tastes better with bacon and its other incarnations. :)
A piece of crusty bread and a glass of red wine, please!
What brick oven?
Footloose, I bought a small locally made portable brick oven. It’s not pretty, but it heats up to 700+F with about two gallons of coal and an hour of time, so it’s quite useful… And it cost 1/10th the price of the fancy imported Italian brick ovens… :)
Oh, I thought I missed a major installation. I never miss to inspect and gawk at wood-fired ovens during bakery shows you know. What dissuaded me from acquiring one was the very long heat up time. The difference of texture and flavour of what they turn out compared to those of natural gas and electric ovens is just staggering.
Adding bacon would be fine, however if you have some pancetta it would be even better and more traditional.
Hi MM, can you share with us where you bought your portable brick oven?
Meg, JY Bricks, Cubao. They have an on-line presence I think.
Got mine from JY bricks too!