Much of the time, I’m cooking from what I’ve got available to me. I don’t like to shop for food more than once or twice a week now, and I don’t often shop specifically for a recipe.
It’s also a question of mood, energy, time, the weather. So often what I do is just take a few cookbooks off the shelf and look at some models for what I’m thinking of, often just to remind me of some components or stages of a possible recipe.
Today I’ve got some chicken thighs to use up and I sort of feel like pasta. The day started gloomy and cold, though the sun’s peeking out now.
They’re bone-in, skin-on thighs, so I want to take advantage of that. I’m thinking a ragu, also often known as a bolognese or neapolitan sauce (those are particular kinds of ragu). You braise some meat in liquid, often with tomatoes added. The meat is sometimes served with the sauce, sometimes later or in a different dish.
I looked through some books that have some similarly built preparations to make sure I had all my bases covered and to think a bit about what I might do with the sauce. I don’t feel it’s got to be notably lighter than the kind of ragu I might make if I had lamb or pork to work with, but I do want a few distinctive notes—plus the sauce isn’t going to be cooking as long as it would if it were a tougher cut of meat.
When you’re looking for ideas or structures with a dish like this, just hitting a single keyword generally won’t help (e.g., looking only for ragu or only for chicken or only for a pasta sauce). You have to think about the overall process of the dish, what you’re intending to do. It’s basically a braise, so any braised chicken recipe might have a good idea or two. I briefly considered doing something more like a cream-based sauce after braising the thighs in stock, but I’m in the mood for a red sauce.
I didn’t get a lot of great ideas from my books, to be honest. (I think I have to put at least two of the ones I brought out to the test in this column someday because I don’t find them helpful very often.)
The basic steps I’m already sure of before I start: brown the thighs first, cook some finely chopped onion and garlic and maybe a chopped carrot in the rendered chicken fat next, then tomato paste and some seasoning. I think I’ll add a few chopped anchovies at that point too. Then some crushed tomatoes, some wine, some chicken stock and the thighs, along with some fresh thyme sprigs and bay leaves.
I mulled over a couple of additions or variations. Should I put olives or lemon zest or even preserved lemons in (or all of them) near the end? I have some mushrooms, and that seems like a good addition. Maybe. Peas seem like they might be a good late addition, but I’m not sure. I’ll decide that near the end. Some prosciutto, maybe? That would go in with the tomato paste early on.
The other thought I had was some chicken livers—fried in the rendered chicken fat after the thighs are browned, then strained into the sauce to get rid of the grainy texture. (One of the top recipes on Top Chef this week gave me this thought, along with the decision to serve this over pappardelle noodles.)
I decided not to use chorizo or tasso ham, both of which I think pull this off in another direction.
So with a few late-stage additions still undecided, I think I’m otherwise pretty settled. There are some kinds of improvisation/using up what’s in the fridge that can go pretty wrong, but a sauce like this one is almost infinitely adjustable and fixable unless you leave it on so long or so hot that it burns or the chicken loses all its flavor