I urge you to try this dish, you will never stop preparing it for the rest of your life
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 4 € pp)
- Salt
- 4 chicken legs
- EV olive oil
- 4 medium onions
- 4 garlic cloves
- 1 tbsp tomato paste
- 100 ml red wine
- 500 ml chicken stock
- A can of tomatoes
- 320 g bucatini
- 40 g butter
- 60 g parmigiano or grana cheese
- 1/2 cinnamon stick broken into pieces
- 1/2 teaspoon allspice
- 1/4 teaspoon cloves
- 1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
- 1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds
- 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
- 1 teaspoon hot smoked paprika
- 1 bay leaves
- 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
This dish, the most famous of my homeland Corfu, is MONUMENTAL, many people consider it better than the relative French dish coq au vin.
Corfiots prepare pastitsado with whole chicken cut in pieces but I suggest you to use chicken legs except if in your family there is a strange consumer who likes chicken breast. Personally I know nobody who does it.
The keys for a good pastitsado are:
a) The spices or the spetsieriko as we say in Corfu. Spices have to be grinded just before using them. So we add all the spices in a mortar or a coffee grinder and we make them ¨dust¨. We pass them from a fine sieve before using them to avoid using not finely grated spices.
b) The density of the sauce which must be thick in order to stick on greased with butter bucatini.
Let´s start.
Pastitsado is a braised meat, so first of all we add some olive oil in a Dutch oven and we brown the chicken legs, we remove them and in the same oil we gently fry the onions and the garlic cloves.
We add 2 – 3 teaspoons of the spice mixture and the tomato paste and we continue cooking for a while, taking care that the tomato does not turn too dark.
We deglaze with the red wine, we add the chopped tomatoes, some salt and the stock and finally the chicken legs. We semi cover the DO with the lid and we let cook at low temperature, until the chicken softens completely. When this happens we take it out and we reduce the sauce until it thickens.
Meanwhile we bring to boil a pot with salted water and we add the bucatini, which is the classic pasta shape for this dish.
Bucatini have two disadvantages:
a) the sauce doesn´t stick well on them as their surface is smooth and have no stripes as penne rigate, rigatoni etc
b) it is impossible to eat them without getting dirty.
So if you like, you can use rigatoni instead of bucatini which are easier to mantecare and also more safely eatable. The only thing you must respect is to keep pasta al dente.
When the pasta is ready we drain it and we mix it with the melted butter, butter flavoured pasta is a basic characteristic of the dish. This would provoke a problem because butter makes the already smooth bucatini even more slippery and so more difficult to keep the sauce on them. To overpass this problem we also add the half portion of the parmesan to the pasta before adding the sauce. The cheese creates an uneven surface on the pasta, something that help us “stick” the sauce on it.
So, when the pasta is greased with butter and mixed with the half amount of the cheese we serve putting on each plate a chicken leg and a portion of pasta. We add the dense sauce over the pasta and the rest of parmigiano and we serve.
