Welcome back! This week’s recipe is sure to be a hit for when you have guests coming over. We’re doing Chicken Breasts Stuffed with Chorizo and Fancy Cheeses. This recipe sounds complicated when you’re throwing around ‘chorizo’ and ‘goat cheese’. Really though, it’s a recipe where most of the work is done either by the brine, or the oven. You just have to spend a few minutes prepping at different stages, and then you can sit back and relax!
Ingredients
¾ cup kosher salt
6 Tbsp Sugar
7 Cups cold water
6 chicken breasts with skin and bone
2 pounds simple chorizo
1 cup goat cheese, crumbled
1 cup grated monterey jack cheese
Kosher salt and pepper
3 Tbsp chopped fresh rosemary
1 Tbsp chopped Fresh Thyme
4 Tbsp butter
Instructions
To brine the chicken, combine the salt, sugar and water in a large bowl and whisk together until the salt and sugar dissolve.
Place the chicken in a large glass casserole dish and cover with the water mixture. Cover with plastic wrap, place in the refrigerator and allow to brine for 3 to 4 hours. ( We didn’t have a casserole dish when we did this, so we used a dutch oven, it worked just as well.)
When the brining is almost complete, prepare the stuffing by cooking sausage in a saute pan over medium-high heat until evenly browned. Drain the fat from the chorizo immediately and transfer the chorizo to a bowl and allow to cool. When cooled, mix the chorizo with the cheeses, salt, pepper and herbs. Set aside.
Place a chicken breast flat on a cutting board or counter surface. Using a paring knife, cut a horizontal slit down the center of the fleshiest part of the breast, creating a pocket. Repeat with all of the chicken breasts, making sure you don’t cut all the way through. Divide the chorizo mixture six ways and fill each of the chicken breasts.
Preheat the oven to 400*F . In a large saute pan, melt 2 tbsp of the butter. Cook the stuffed breasts, skin side down over medium high heat until browned. Transfer the breasts to a foil lined baking sheet and bake for 30 minutes or until chicken is thoroughly cooked. While the chicken is baking, melt the remaining 2 tbsp of butter in a small saute pan and use to baste the chicken breasts as they cook.
Notes:
What is brining and why do we do it?
Brining is a solution of water and salt, sometimes with additional spices thrown in for flavoring.
Lean meats like turkey, chicken and pork tend to lose moisture as they cook. We’ve all had chicken and pork that turned out like shoeleather after being cooked, no matter how delicious the spices were. Brining is a way to prevent this. You can actually cut down moisture loss from the usual 30% to as little as 15%, meaning that your lean meats will come out juice and delicious.
This doesn’t mean that you should soak your meats for too long though. In fact, if you brine your meats for longer than they need they can become tough and overly salty. You can check out a timetable for brining over at Fine Cooking, or print out this nifty chart from The Spruce to put into your cookbook.
Chorizo
If you don’t keep chorizo in your house regularly, not to worry. This quick and easy recipe from The Spruce Eats is fast to cook up and freezes well. They even give you ideas on what else you can use it in if you decide you need more of this flavorful sausage stat.
Thank you for joining us this week! We hope you enjoyed our recipe this time around. If you did, please let us know on our Facebook and share a picture of the final dish! We’d love to see how yours turns out. If you have any recipe suggestions or questions that you’d like us to answer, please drop those in the comments below or over on our Facebook, we love to hear from you!
If on the other hand, something in your home isn’t behaving right, your fridge is icing over or your dryer isn’t drying, give us a call. You can also make an appointment with one of our technicians on our page. We want to keep your home running smoothly, for all of our clients in Garland and the surrounding areas.
Our recipe this week is based on the one within The Texas Cowboy Kitchen by Grady Spears and June Naylor. Check out their book over on B&N or your favorite bookstore. Not only is it fantastic as a cookbook, it also makes a great coffee table book due to its large size, beautiful pictures and bite-sized history lessons.