Poulet Basquaise

Chicken braised with peppers, tomatoes and chilli

For years I’ve heard chefs talk in mythical whispers about a part of the world that lives to eat. Stories of glistening piles of paper thin jamón that melt on your tongue like tabs of acid and transport you to porky nirvana. They say there are anchovies the size of your forearm and an endless supply of exquisitely good but cheap wine. They say that here, everyone is like me; fascinated by food, its provenance and prominence.

In this ancient enclave of culinary culture, each dish is a sparkling reflection of time and place. For a cook, the Basque Country occupies a geographical Goldilocks spot, sandwiched between the Cantabrian Mountains to the South West, the Bay of Biscay to the North and the gastronomic might of France to the East. You can taste the weight of history and tradition here. If European Cuisine is the dartboard, this is its bullseye. Sorry Italy.

Last year, I spent a few weeks in both the Spanish and French sides of the Basque Country, in summer and in winter. There are many more things for me to write about from those trips, many dishes to describe, recipes to discuss and history to unpack, but for now I’m going to give you a recipe for something I learnt to make there. Poulet Basquaise is really a perfect bit of home cooking. It’s easy, you can buy all of the ingredients without trouble and it scales up well to feed lots of people/ leftovers.

I’ve made a few tweaks to the recipe I was taught to account for the fact that most of us won’t be making this whilst actually in the Basque Country, but they are minor alterations and don’t change the soul of the dish. The first is that for accessibility, I’ve swapped out Bayonne ham for bacon, and because of that we’ll cook the bacon at the start to render out its fat. Bayonne ham is lean, and so you can add it with the chicken, but if you do that with bacon it will be chewy and flaccid.

The second is that I’ve used pul biber (Aleppo pepper) in place of piment d’Espelette, the variety of chilli grown in Espelette and used prolifically in Basque cooking. Piment d’Espelette is much harder to find, and very expensive (about £12 for 40g). Pul biber, on the other hand, is both cheap and quite easy to find in large supermarkets or Turkish/ Mediterranean shops. Whilst not identical, it has the same fruity, sun-dried tomato flavour, and when combined with a little paprika works as a fine alternative. You could also use 1/2tsp of regular chilli flakes alongside the paprika and it will still be delicious.

You’ll see in the recipe notes that I add the chicken breast to the dish at a later point than the legs. This is a bit of a cheffy thing but is simply based on the principle that legs are better when cooked for longer, and breast isn’t.