A few weeks ago, Wylie chicken-shamed me.
Maybe you know the drill: following a long day at the office, you stop at the supermarket on your way home and pick up a roast chicken. I was about to do just that, and texted home to see if I should pick up anything else.
“Just buy a raw chicken,” said Wylie, who is temporarily living with us post-college-graduation in a figuring-things-out moment. “I’ll roast it. It’ll be so much better, and it’s so easy.” Who could argue?
While the hunt for a job in his field has not been thus far fruitful, he has taken full advantage of the parental larder — and our delight at being cooked for — in order to develop his kitchencraft.
Wylie making pasta dough from Evan Funke’s ‘American Sfloglio’
Like many fledgling cooks of his generation, Wylie really gets into cooking projects — the more elaborate the better. The most gleeful I’ve seen him since graduation was when we spent two days making tagliatelle al ragù della vecchia scuola from Evan Funke’s American Sfoglino cookbook — a process which started with putting various meats through a manual meat grinder for the ragù, and passing simmered tomatoes through a food mill. (My favorite line in the recipe: “Begin tasting for tenderness and seasoning after 5 hours.”) We used a rolling pin to roll the pasta dough, and a knife to cut it; Funke’s philosophy is summed up in his hashtag #fuckyourpastamachine.
And so, when through a curious set of circumstances I brought a shiny new Instant Pot — one of those countertop pressure cookers — into the house, he regarded the thing with contempt.
Not that I blame him; it’s the way he was raised. But for reasons having to do with my consulting business, I wanted to explore the possibilities. And if by some miracle I took to the thing, well, maybe it would lead to fewer supermarket roast chicken situations post work-days.
Because precise timing is involved, and the thing was utterly foreign to me, I couldn’t just dive in and start improvising; I had to learn the basics first. I went to a couple of admired and reliable sources: New York Times Cooking and Serious Eats.
It was at the latter that I turned up a recipe that looked so implausible I couldn’t wait to try it: J. Kenji López-Alt’s Easy Pressure Cooker Green Chili with Chicken. In other words, chicken chile verde.
I couldn’t wait to show Wylie, who naturally scoffed. The recipe would have us believe that you could throw raw chicken thighs, onion, garlic, tomatillos, spices and chiles into the vessel, push a button and (once the machine came to pressure) 15 minutes later you’d have something gorgeous and profoundly delicious.
First time around Wylie insisted on browning the chicken thighs on top of the stove first. So we tried it like that. Then we tried it exactly as written. Then we tried it giving the poblano, Anaheim and serrano chiles, along with the onion, garlic and tomatillos, a quick char on a comal, as you would in a traditional chile verde recipe.
I’m here to tell you it was very good each and every time. We served it once with home-made corn tortillas (fantastic!), with handmade tortillas picked up from a nearby Mexican restaurant when we were out of masa harina and couldn’t find any nearby (also fantastic) and with corn tortillas we bought at Trader Joe’s and reheated in the microwave (even that was pretty good).
We stirred a couple tablespoonfuls of masa harina (a traditional thickener for these types of braises) into the finished dish: perfect!
We also added an optional garnish of crumbled queso blanco, which rounds out the flavors beautifully; if you’re wrapping the chile verde into tacos, some crumbled queso blanco added in each one is lovely.
What of our various other attempts at improvements?
Because the Instant Pot is all about ease, our recipe uses boneless, skinless chicken thighs instead of using skin-on, bone-in thighs and then removing skin and bones (if the dish lost any depth of flavor as a result of not cooking with the bones, I couldn’t detect it).
Browning the chicken, however, did not noticeably improve the dish, so we jettisoned that step.
Charring the chiles and garlic cloves (in their skins) adds slight value — a subtle charry, roasty flavor — do that only if you feel like it and have an extra few minutes (meanwhile, it’s easier to seed charred chiles than raw).
Don’t bother charring the onion or tomatillos because the charry payoff is less, and it’s a little messier.
Though our version of the recipe — which we call Chicken Chile Verde (Quick and Easy Pressure-Cooking Version) — calls for boneless, skinless thighs, of course you can also use bone-in, skin-on thighs as the original recipe suggests, simply removing the bones and skin before shredding the chicken. Also, for whatever it’s worth, one time I forgot to buy Anaheim chiles, and so just made it with poblanos — and there wasn’t much of a difference in flavor.
OK, then — a quick walk through. The only active time it takes to speak of is prepping the onion, chiles and tomatillos, which get husked and quartered; the chiles are seeded then roughly chopped, like the onion. (If you’re going to char the chiles, you’d do that before seeding and chopping, and you can toss the garlic cloves in their skins on the skillet, comal or griddle to char as well.) Toast a tablespoon of cumin seeds in a small pan till fragrant. Set the pressure cooker to SAUTE, and toss in all of those things, along with three pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs and a pinch of salt. Once it sizzles a bit, seal the pressure cooker and cook on HIGH PRESSURE for 15 minutes. Release the steam, remove the chicken and shred it. Add López-Alt’s brilliant secret ingredient (Asian fish sauce!), along with salt to taste and a handful of cilantro, blitz the sauce — either with an immersion blender or in a regular blender or food processor — then stir in a couple tablespoons of masa harina. Shred the chicken and return it to the sauce. Garnish with more cilantro, and (if you like) some crumbled queso blanco. Serve it with warm corn tortillas and maybe some limes and more crumbled queso blanco.
Here’s the recipe. Please (please!) let us know how you like it.
Or, if you’d prefer an old-fashioned, long, lazy and aromatic braised-the-on-the-stove experience, let us know that as well, and we’ll hurry up with Chile Verde (Stovetop Version).
[RECIPE: Chicken Chile Verde]