Recipe Rundown: "One-Pot Chicken and Rice with Blender Green Sauce" from Carla Lalli Music's "That Sounds So Good"
Carla Lalli Music is a celebrity chef, former Bon Appétit content creator, and YouTube personality, living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her first cookbook, Where Cooking Begins: Uncomplicated Recipes to Make You a Great Cook, published by Penguin Random House and released in 2019, is a James Beard Award winner. Her second and most recent book, That Sounds So Good, also published by Penguin, is a New York Times Best Seller.
I have a bit of an infatuation with Carla Lalli Music; I've followed her since her earlier Bon Appétit days, before I entered the kitchen, myself, and I've since been fully converted to her methods of eating, cooking, and thinking about food. That method being one dedicated to the unapologetic and stress-free enjoyment of eating.
I'd like to emphasize "stress-free," as one of Carla's MO's is her consistently uncomplicated recipes; there is no turkey-trussing, à la Julia Child, to be found, here.
That being said, this one-pot chicken recipe (pg. 53) from That Sounds So Good eludes me. To be completely honest, this isn't the first time I've tested this recipe, nor is it the second time; this is my third time attempting to understand how this could be considered a "brag-worthy" dish, in Carla's own words.
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One-Pot Chicken and Rice with Blender Green Sauce, page 52 |
In the description for this recipe, Carla mentions that, in other iterations of this "arroz con pollo" likened dish, there are often two outcomes: rice that is mushy and chicken that is dry, or rice that is crunchy and chicken that is still dry. Carla's version, she claims, is neither of these things. Instead, Carla promises "perfectly cooked rice and chicken, harmoniously together in one pot."
The issue here is not the taste of the dish--in fact, this is one of my favorite flavor combinations from Carla's books (I own both), with a tangy and mouth-watering green sauce that pairs perfectly with the fragrant ginger and cilantro rice. The problem with this recipe is the method and logistics, primarily concerning the conflicting cooking times of the chicken and rice. I could not find any harmony to speak of.
The chicken, of which Carla calls for 3 pounds of bone-in, skin-on chicken quarters, cooks too slowly compared to the rice, which cooks too quickly. The end result is raw chicken and mushy rice, which forces you to remove the chicken and cook it to doneness in a separate vessel, defeating the whole purpose of "one-pot" chicken and rice.
Perplexingly, the recipe instructs you to brown the chicken, skin-side down, for only 4-6 minutes, intentionally leaving it under-cooked. The idea is that the chicken will finish cooking in the pot with the rice via steam, but 28 minutes--the allotted cooking time for the rice--is not nearly enough time to fully cook a whole chicken quarter. In other recipes featuring chicken quarters, like her "Low-and-Slow Spiced Chicken Legs with Garlic Crunch-Crumbs," found on page 142, Carla gives the chicken a whopping 3 hours in the oven, albeit at 300 degrees (and it's delicious, of course).
What's more is that 28 minutes seems far too long to cook 1.5 cups of rice; when using a rice cooker, it takes about 20 minutes, with 5 of those minutes being allotted for the cooker to release the steam inside the cooking vessel.
The only way I can explain this baffling discrepancy with the cooking times is the size of her chicken quarters: based on the photo, her location, and the fact that she often refers to the grocery store as "the market," I suspect the chicken she purchases is organic. AKA, her chicken is anatomically correct and not super-sized like the standard chicken found in a suburban grocery chain. However, if that is the case, there should be some acknowledgment of this within the recipe. Alas, there is not, and this recipe--while delicious in theory--has to be majorly adapted to work.
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My finished recreation: the green sauce really is the star of the show |
When all is said and done, this recipe is definitely not beginner friendly: the amount of trouble shooting alone would make any tentative home cook throw in the towel. I myself have engaged with other home cooks online, trying to work out the kinks in this recipe, to no avail. The next time I crave the flavors of this dish, I'll be pulling out my trusty rice cooker, which always delivers on its promise of perfectly cooked rice.
Good to see you moving into food writing more fully—I think this is a great direction to go in, definitely more in line with where you're hoping to end up as a writer!
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