I’ll be honest–I have no idea why this is “special chicken”. But for me, 6-16: The Chef’s Special Chicken will be special because I made it with “chick’n” instead of the real thing. I guess that’s not all that special for me at this point, but maybe for you?
If you search for “chef’s special chicken”, you’ll get a million different types of recipes, so I’m not sure what makes this one especially traditional. Although this one I found is pretty much this same exact recipe, so I guess it’s not as unknown as I thought. That or someone ripped off Simply Delicious and called it their own.
In a restaurant when you see “chef’s special”, it usually translates to “this is about to go bad so let’s try to sell it tonight however we can”. #themoreyouknow
This is just chicken with a creamy bacon/onion sauce…of course it’s going to be “good”.
Is it avant-garde cuisine? No. Is it easy and quick to make up for Wednesday night dinner and people are likely to eat it without complaint? Yes. And let’s be honest–for most home cooks, the latter is the primary concern.
Ingredients. As I mentioned, this is going to be special chick’n, not chicken. That means we also need to swap the bacon for bac’n as well–the type I show here is not my favorite type of fake bacon, but it’s the type I had at the time. Also, we’re going full half-and-half for the sauce out of convenience.
As I mentioned, I’m not a huge fan of this particular type of “fake bacon”, but I thought its texture would work the best for this dish.
Since I’m working with meatless ingredients, I have to do things a bit differently to try to achieve similar results. These “chick’n” breasts aren’t really raw, but they are frozen, so they will need to be cooked in some sort of way so they taste like something. I’m starting off by just sautéing them in the pan to defrost and get a bit of color.
Cooking up the “bac’n” pieces–I can’t do a normal rendering like with real bacon, but there’s still a fair amount of grease/flavor that will come off of even the fake stuff.
Cooking the leeks green onions in the same grease (maybe with some additional oil as well).
Now it’s time to turn that grease into a roux with some flour. This will form the base of our cream sauce.
Once it’s become a roux, it’s time to add in the half-and-half.
Sliced up my “chick’n” so it would approximate breast slices.
Final plate–it’s creamy chick’n with a bac’n sauce. Kind of reminds me of chicken carbonara.
Grade: B+
