A recipe for 'Iron Chef' Chicken Cacciatore

Welcome to Kitchen Stadium, where we're having a different chicken recipe for a birthday.

In middle school, after years of intense suffering brought on by only being able to watch PBS, Saturday morning cartoons, and NBC’s Thursday night programming, my family finally got cable. I attribute this to my dad’s recovery from heart surgery—this is also when he rented all the VHS tapes of The Sopranos from the library; more on that here. This is also when he began a heavy diet of The Food Network. We had already watched plenty of food shows on PBS, but with the addition of this new network entirely devoted to food, I became obsessed Iron Chef, which The Food Network began airing in 1999. In the first episode I remember watching, squid was the special ingredient, and one of the chefs made squid ink ice cream. I was enraptured.

In any case, this fixation inspired me to have an Iron Chef birthday party with some of my nearest and dearest friends, several of whom I could text and ask to recall their experiences of that night. But since I have fairly strong memories of it I’m going to avoid doing so lest it devolve into them poking fun at what a dork I was. My mom was incredible at organizing birthday parties, and for this one, she split us into two teams, one to make dinner and one to make dessert (not Iron Chef canon, but for the purposes of this exercise, we’ll take it). (She remembers us filming it because it was supposed to be a TV competition, but hasn’t been able to check the hard drives to find the alleged footage. I think she might be confusing this with the murder mystery party she threw for me when I was like seven.) The menu we decided on was Chicken Cacciatore—which means “hunter”—and Lemon Meringue Pie; the latter was, I believe, from the Fannie Farmer Junior Cookbook, one of the few cookbooks I was given during the time I thought I wanted to be a pastry chef. I can’t tell you why I decided on these two recipes, but I assume it’s because they are two things I had already learned how to make.

I remember having a great time at the party, though my most competitive friend Hannah really lost it when one of the judges—which included my mother—deemed the result of the competition “a tie.” But I don’t think I’ve had much Chicken Cacciatore since—well, until this week.

I started off making tomato sauce sort of my dad’s way—though I would never normally prefer this, being an aforementioned Marcella fan myself, but there were already onions in the recipe for the Cacciatore, so it seemed less repetitive. (It’s funny this recipe exists at all; I mostly remember having jarred sauce as a kid.) I prefer a San Marzano canned tomato, so that’s what I used, along with some carrots that had been conveniently hanging out in the fridge. I skipped the sliced mushrooms (didn’t have any; don’t like those in sauce), parsley, and basil, though I chuckled at his distinction that both of those herbs dried are “useless”—it’s true. We didn’t have tomato paste but the rest I mostly followed. All went into a Lodge pot.

Because I had already put the onion in the sauce, I decided I might as well add the pepper and garlic to it as well—it was an afterthought, so they didn’t get browned, but whatever. Once the sauce was going, I browned the chicken legs in a separate cast iron. For a side starch, we actually were out of rice and only had a little bit of pasta. But I had been reading and thinking about beans and tomato sauce, so at the last minute, decided to try pressure cooking some Rancho Gordo white beans. It took a little longer than whatever Jackson googled said it would (of course), but the end time that seemed to work was 40 minutes on high, quick release.

Once the chicken was done, I set it aside, and cooked some kale from our garden in the fat—iconic, I know. “I kind of think greens and beans could go so well,” said Jackson to which I was like, yes, that’s what we’re eating? Turns out he meant literally on top of each other on your plate—yes it’s your plate, do what you will!

As the beans cooked, I added the chicken to the sauce and it really does get beautifully soft, and infused a sauce I wasn’t that impressed with with some nice liquid (it helped that I added some of the rendered chicken fat to it).

Honestly, the beans and greens were inspired, and I loved how the flavors melded together in the chicken. I may not understand why I thought this chicken recipe was one worthy of an Iron Chef birthday—my mom has since revealed that it was her recipe that she got “from a cookbook I had in college, and I used to make it all the time, because it was cheap, fed a lot of people and could be made ahead of time”—but it was certainly worthy of a Wednesday night.

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