How To Poach Chicken

I'm going to show you how to make poached chicken. I'm going to do a few things slightly differently from the way you would normally do it. Now, the first thing is you could season the chicken but I'm not going to do that, I will do that later, I'm just going to put 3 thighs into a pan, they are quite small.

I'm going to add some stock and use water to this. And if you can come in close, just to see how much I'm doing, just cover the ingredient with stock, which is cold, I'm going to put a bay leaf and a couple of peppercorns in. Put it on a high flame and put the lid on.

And what will happen is in about two or three minutes time, it will come to boil. I'm going to put the temperature down to a gentle simmer and I'm going to leave those thighs to poach for probably about twelve to fifteen minutes. As you can see, that has now come up to boil so I'm going to turn the temperature right down to a gentle simmer, and we're going to leave that for about ten more minutes and it will be done.

So, that chicken has been poaching away now for about fifteen minutes and it is beautifully cooked. What I'm going to do is I will take the chicken pieces out now because regardless of when the chicken is going to be served, what you want to do is just let it rest when it comes out. And what I'm going to do now is take out the bay leaf; I'll take out the peppercorn.

What I'm going to do now, in fact, if you just come around and have a quick look, so what is going to happen now is that is going to come up to the boiler and we're just going to reduce the volume of the liquid down until we get a nice sauce. So, that is now reduced to a nice thick sauce, so I can top those lovely chicken pieces with that. And I think that's a beautiful way of poaching chicken. .