"Anything but Chicken Galantine; anything but the Chicken Galatine," I thought as I reached into the chef's hat for my pick for our final practical exam these past two days. I reached out and slowly opened a piece of paper that said "Ay" (meaning "A"...the last time we picked out of a hat, we complained how the chef wrote his As). My heart sank into the deep pits of despair where the spirits of the chickens and ducks we mauled the past few weeks rested. I heaved a sigh at the new chicken I would have to debone. Letter A on the list of finals foods to prepare matched with Chicken Galantine.
Chicken Galantine is a traditional French dish made of chicken and a forcemeat, highly seasoned ground protein similar to meatloaf. It is then shaped into the bird it originally was or shaped into a roulade, a much simpler form to make.
Luckily, I only had to make the roulade for finals and not a ground pork shaped chicken. A roulade is what it sounds like, a roll! It's like a jellyroll, but with chicken and ground meat.
The first step was to grind up some pork butt (not really its butt, but the butt of the shoulder of a pig) with some extra pork fat. We usually use a
meat grinder to grind up the pork, but today it was not available and we had to use the food processor. The ground pork and fat was mixed with some cooking sherry for flavor, some blanched pistachios, diced, boiled ham for garnish and color, and an egg to bind everything together.
Next was the part I dreaded: deboning the chicken.
Side note: Just to let you know, I've chosen the baking/pastry path of the culinary field because I not only love making cakes, pastries, and all that sweetness, but I really don't like touching raw meat. I think my mother, the nurse, instilled in me as a child a constant fear of raw meat's tendency to attract microbial organisms that cause sickness and disease and even death. Having all this reinforced in my Food Microbiology and other Food Science courses worsened my fear of raw meat. The other reason I don't like working with meat is because when the chef gets to the meat, it still has an awfully close resemblance to what it was before.
Now back to our regular program!
There was no getting around it. I just had to bite the bullet and do it. The first step at deboning poultry is to pop the joints of the bird so they become easier to chop off. Sure, the chickens are beheaded, defeathered, and cleaned before we get to them as chefs, but it just tears my heart out to make the little wing flap and see where I should cut it off.
After shaking off the shock of chopping off a chicken's wing, you have to make a cut down it's back and dig out the wishbone, which is basically the bird's collar bone. Next, you make a long cut down its back so you can start pulling off the meat from the skeletal carcass. When you get to the thighs, you have to cut at the tendons so you can pull the bones out. It takes some practice to cut up the tendons without tearing out too much meat, or even your hand for that matter. Hold the thigh up like a lollipop and cut all the way around. It is difficult to describe in words.
After you pull out all the bones and the carcass, you're left with a rectangular-ish flesh and skin of the chicken. Hold the chicken with the one wing and leg on the top border of your rectangle with the other set on the bottom border. Place a line of your forcemeat on the upper half, then start to roll up like an eggroll, burrito, jellyroll, or whichever food analogy you like.Wrap up the log of meat in plastic wrap, like a piece of candy or saltwater taffy, and tie the ends with butcher's string. You have just made the roulade form of a galantine! Poach the galantine in chicken stock or water until it reaches an internal temperature of 165 F. Once it reaches this temperature, you need to hold it there for at least 15 seconds, for sanitation reasons. Set aside and let cool.
Chicken galantine is traditionally served cold. Here is my final product, sliced down and presented to see the pretty garnish inside. I plated the slices on a bed of radicchio leaves, with apple chutney and three carrot blossoms (Super easy to make; I'll write about vegetable florals in a future post).
After all the headache and heartache of turning this bird into a chicken log stuffed with meat, I ended up scoring extremely well (100!) for my final. Hooray! This chicken died with a purpose of helping me get a perfect score. Yeah, that's pretty selfish of me; but hey, at least it was made into something beautiful and not mixed with other chickens to make a boatload of processed nuggets.
"If it bothers you so much, why do you eat meat?" you ask. After having to chop up a chicken incredibly close to its original, wing flapping form, I have had thoughts of converting to vegetarianism. But, I'm not going to lie, I still love poultry and meat as much as the next guy. Seeing it as a prepared food makes me forget it was once flapping around, laying eggs, leading little chicklets to safety...oh man, here I go...
- Sandwich
