Even after working in kitchens for years, I'm still a sucker for food porn. I was watching an old episode of Lidia's Italy recently and she was making one of her mom's chicken recipes. The close-ups of the golden, browned crispy chicken skin and caramelized onions frying in a shiny black cast iron skillet had me glued to the TV. I'm literally salivating as I type this!
Suddenly I was craving a similar Italian-American dish called chicken scarpariello, chicken with onions, peppers, hot pickled peppers, and Italian sausage in a sweet, spicy-sour pan sauce. I'm salivating again. It's a little different than what Lidia made, her's had potatoes and bacon, but delicious nonetheless.
I'd never cooked scarpariello before but really, how could it be bad? My goal was that every element be perfectly cooked, and that you should be able to make it on a Tuesday night after a long day at work—and not hate the guy that wrote the recipe after.
Notes on the recipe:
One of my biggest food peeves is when you spend a lot of time and effort to make something crispy and then drown it in sauce. Soggy. Gross. Not into it. To avoid this, instead of stewing the potatoes with the pan sauce, I roasted them cut-side down in a hot oven to get them crispy—and keep them that way. The upside of this method is that it frees you up to brown the chicken, onion, and peppers on the stove while the potatoes cook. Multitasking!
The winning detail with scarpariello is the pan sauce: White wine, chicken broth, pickled peppers, white wine vinegar, and rosemary create this savory, sweet-sour sauce that you'll want to lick off the plate (hence the side potatoes). I preferred the flavor of Peppadew peppers, so we went with those, but any pickled peppers will work.
And because the oven's on already for the potatoes, I finished the dish in the oven. Once everything is browned and the sauce is slightly reduced, you nestle the chicken back in the pan with the skin poking out of the sauce, so it can crisp up again in the oven. (That's the same technique in our perfect pan-roasted chicken thigh recipe, too, because it creates the ideal combo of crispy skin + juicy meat.)
We have daily tastings at 3 p.m. in the test kitchen and on the afternoon I was planning to put scarpariello up for a critique, our food delivery was late. Like really late. I tore through the boxes to find my chicken, sausage, and potatoes and had about 50 minutes to get "dinner" on the table. I was nervous, but that food was up and on the tasting table at 3:00 on the dot.
So, dinner for four in under an hour? You got it.
