recipe: chicken&corn chowder

perfect for winter, this week’s recipe, a chowder, conjures up childhood memories of my mother’s cooking like few other dishes: she would appear at the front door & call us in from the garden, where we were playing, grubby & breathless from climbing the pohutakawa tree, laying down a basket of bread & steaming bowls of chowder,  rich & creamy, & full of flavour.

i’ve taken a few liberties (standard practise, really) this time to allow for dining in a gluten/wheat sensitive age. straying from the standard white flour norm, i like to combine alternative grains & flours to explore what can only be described as an often neglected aspect to the way we approach those types of ingredients equally as available, but sadly less regularly stocked & used in the modern pantry.

  

stage1:

butter

chickpea flour&potato starch

chicken stock

cream

*make yr roux: over a medium heat, melt the butter in a decent sized pot, add an equal quantity of  chickpea/potato starch (ie: 50gbutter +25gchickpea flour+25gpotato starch) & bring it together with a wooden spoon till it forms a kind of ball but don’t let it brown;

*separately, in a 2^nd pot, bring the chicken stock to simmering point;

*roux to veloute sauce: once the roux is good to go, slowly add the hot stock, bit by bit, stirring thoroughly at every step to ensure yr sauce doesn’t go lumpy (swapping yr wooden spoon for a whisk might save yr sanity here);

*veloute to supreme sauce: add a generous quantity of cream, stirring in;

*bring the sauce to a bare simmer (that’s simmer NOT boil) stirring regularly to stop it catching on the bottom of the pot, for 15 mins or so.

onion&bay&whole cloves

*make a cloute by slicing yr onion in half & pinning a bay leaf to the cut side with 3 whole cloves. drop this into the veloute sauce as a seasoning while the sauce simmers away. the cloute brings a delicious savoury sweetness to the sauce (oh, & you remove it at the end!) 

stage2:

onion&garlic

leek&celery&carrot

orange kumara

parsley stalks&thyme

corn kernels, frozen is just fine

s’n’p

*chop yr veg to the same size, i like mine cut macedoine, (smallish & square) & drop all in the now empty chicken stock pot with a good knob of butter, a little salt, put the lid on, give it a shake & sweat yr veg for about 5 mins or so. this lets them all get to know eachother a bit in just the way that makes our finished chowder even better.

*add the veg to the supreme sauce & stir it in gently.

chicken (best quality, free range & organic is yr only option here folks)

*shred the chicken meat & drop into the chowder, stirring gently, & allow it to poach in the simmering chowder. alternatively, roast yr chicken 1^st, then shred & add.  this is a great way to use up yr left over roast from last night.

stage3:

to finish, add a little cream, or stock, to get the right consistency, not too thick&not too thin, then add a big bunch of fresh herbs, roughly chopped, parsley, sage&coriander all work nicely here. i like to grate lemon or orange zest in there as well, just because…

voila!