Chicken confit: Your ticket to a Parisian dinner party
“Let’s be honest,” said Rebekah Peppler in À Table: Recipes for Cooking + Eating the French Way (Chronicle Books). “Duck confit is a once-a-year dish”—even in France, where it’s something of a signature. Chicken confit, on the other hand, is “a meal I make just as often in swimsuit weather as I do in the dark gray of winter.” It’s far more affordable, of course, and that’s important when you make it a priority, as I do, to regularly host dinners of six to eight in a small Paris apartment, starting with drinks at 6 on the balcony.
You will need a lot of olive oil, but I recommend using a relatively inexpensive one for cooking, because heating the oil negates some of its nuances. The dish itself is “incredibly simple to make,” but it does require a little forethought: You need to let the chicken season overnight with garlic, herbs, and lemon. And the oven time is more than two hours.
Once you all reach the table, make a night of it. In my home, “we pass plates and bottles and stories back and forth until only heels of bread remain,” and it’s a house rule that I do not start cleaning until every guest has left. “The moment people start to get up from the table to clean en masse is the moment the magic of the night breaks—don’t let it.”
Recipe of the week
Chicken confit
4 lbs skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs or whole legs
1½ tbsp fine sea salt or kosher salt, plus more as needed
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper, plus more as needed
1 lemon, thinly sliced
4 garlic cloves, smashed, plus 2 garlic heads, unpeeled and halved crosswise 4 fresh thyme sprigs
2 bay leaves 2 large leeks, tough outer layer and dark tops removed, halved, cleaned, and cut into 1-inch pieces
5 to 6 cups extra-virgin olive oil
1½ cups green olives, such as Picholine or Lucques
Pat chicken dry with paper towels and season with salt and pepper. Transfer to a bowl and add lemon slices, smashed garlic cloves, thyme, and bay leaves. Cover with a lid or plate and refrigerate overnight.
Preheat oven to 275.
Place leeks and garlic head halves in the bottom of a large Dutch oven. Add chicken, lemon slices, and herbs. Pour in oil (it should cover the chicken completely) and cover pot with a tight-fitting lid. Bake in oven for 2 hours, then add olives to pot and return to oven for 15 minutes more.
Preheat broiler. Set an ovenproof cooling rack on a baking sheet and use a slotted spoon to transfer chicken to the rack. Broil until chicken skin is crisp and browned, 5 to 8 minutes depending on the strength of the broiler.
Transfer chicken to a serving platter. Use a slotted spoon to fish out the leeks, olives, garlic, and lemons, then scatter them around the chicken. Serves 6.