Garlic Confit Chicken with Rosemary Pesto Recipe
One of my favorite chicken recipes is a Russian walnut sauce chicken dish, which is made with chicken that is marinaded in olive oil, lemon, tarragon, and garlic, before being barbecued. It creates such a wonderful combination of flavors, with the smoky notes from the barbecue that is combined with nice herbal notes, all complemented by the sharpness of the lemon. It’s so good that the pesto is pretty much like cheating, but it also comes with a walnut sauce that goes great with it: it’s my go-to recipe if I ever want to impress with chicken. You can try it out too! There’s a reason why it is one of my first recipes that I have on this site. I really recommend the cookbook I had adapted and modified it from.
I’m always interested in seeing if I can change and either improve or at least alter recipes: it’s interesting to try to identify essential flavors within them and alter them. Of course, the easiest recipe modification is simply “increase garlic,” which is a common enough addition as well for myself – if you want it to be good, if it calls for 1 put in 3, if it calls for 3 put in 6, if it calls for 6 put in 12, if it calls for 12 empty out the grocery store aisle! But while this does work, more interesting is different key flavors, with a template that you then modify. My Russian walnut sauce chicken recipe is exactly one such recipe.
Recently, I’ve been experimenting a lot with garlic confit. Garlic confit is a French style of cooking garlic, which is based around putting an absurd number of individual cloves of garlic (several dozen), peeled but not chopped, into a bath of olive oil with some rosemary, and then either baking it or cooking it over low heat. You’d think that it would be the garlic itself that would be the starring recipe with this, but while the garlic is certainly a very nice component, it is actually the oil which gets the most benefit, becoming simply infused with a wondrous complement of garlic and herbal flavors. This makes for a gloriously tantalizing flavor, beautiful to go with all sorts of things, the perfect refinement to a traditional olive oil. Put it in salads, use it to sautee, marinades, pretty much anything is very nicely improved by garlic confit olive oil.
I’ve put it in a whole host of different things, with some of my favorites including garlic confit polenta pies, garlic confit stuffed pelmeni, and garlic-confit infused pesto rolls. I had been trying to think about some additional ways to use it though, and so this got me thinking about the idea of using it with barbecued meats as a marinade, and with that the combination of it with the barbecued chicken was born. The garlic confit olive oil adds in a nice layer of refinement and elegance to it, positively serenading the chicken with the flavor of rosemary.
Rosemary is something which I’m blessed with in copious quantities, due to having not just one, but two big rosemary bushes. I love rosemary’s flavor, which is so green, so pure, so fresh: it’s the quintessential garden, herbal flavor to me, with only thyme approaching it. Since I have so much fresh rosemary, I throw it in hordes of things, using it in marinades, in bouquet garni, sauces, and rubs. For my pesto with this recipe, I thought that an excellent way to vary on the traditional walnut pesto that I make with cilantro would be to add in the garlic from the garlic confit, some of the oil, and above all else with rosemary. It makes for a very nice herbal pesto, one that complements the chicken very nicely.
And there you have it – wondrously marinated chicken soaked in the flavor of garlic, lemon, and rosemary, with a great smoky taste from being grilled, and then paired with a fragrant garlic confit and rosemary pesto. What a host of refreshing and delicious flavors!
This recipe is entirely my own.
Ingredients
- 4 chicken breasts
- 2 cups olive oil
- 5 bulbs garlic, cloves separted and peeled
- 4 + 10 sprigs rosemary
- 1/2 cup walnuts
- 1 + 1 teaspoons salt
- pepper, plentiful
- 1 teaspoon coriander
- 1/4 teaspoon cayenne
- 2 1/2 lemons, juice of
- 1 cup chicken stock
- 1 teaspoon tarragon
Instructions
- Preferably around half a day before you eat, or more, separate out the garlic cloves and peel them. In a small oven-proof container such as a large ramekin or small baking dish, add in the garlic, 4 sprigs of rosemary, and cover with the olive oil. Cook for 2 hours at a low temperature, such as 250 degrees F.
- Salt and pepper the chicken breasts, and then apply rosemary. If you want additional penetration of the marinating liquids, you can score it lightly. Place into a marinating vessel, and squeeze out the juice of 2 lemons into it. Once the garlic confit is finished cooking, add in 1 ½ cups of its oil, as well as the rosemary. Refrigerate the rest of the garlic confit. Marinate the chicken for at least 8 hours.
- Make the pesto shortly before this is done. In a food processor or blender, combine together the remaining olive oil, the garlic, the walnuts, juice of ½ lemon, the cayenne, coriander, 1 teaspoon of salt, some pepper, and the 10 sprigs of rosemary, stems removed. Add in 1 cup of chicken stock (if you don’t have this some white wine would work well too). Blend until smooth: if it is too thick then add in more liquid. Adjust seasonings as necessary.
- Prepare your barbecue or grill according to instruction (you can also cook it in the oven but this is not as tasty). Remove the chicken from the marinading mixture, along with the rosemary. You can either boil down the marinading liquid to form a sort of lemon sauce, or use it as a cooking liquid in polenta or rice to not waste it – in any case, be careful to boil it at length to prevent any potential infection from the raw chicken.
- Barbecue the chicken: your barbecue temperature may vary, I personally did something like 10 and 10 minutes. Be careful when putting it on the grill since the olive oil can easily flame up: it might be good to position it to the outside, or putting it on briefly to sear it and adjusting it constantly until all the oil is burned up.
- Serve alongside the pesto, over some sort of carbohydrate or grain preferably: I had tried it with polenta, but I think that rice would be better, helping to soak up more pesto.
