Braised chicken with mushrooms, olives, and chick peas

I can be a stubborn cook.

Yeah, I prattle on about listening to ingredients and going with the flow, but sometimes all that goes out the window, and I want what I want, whether the ingredients at hand happen to agree or not.

Last week, I wanted dipping broth. It was biting cold outside, the kind of weather that calls for soupy, wet heat that releases slowly in your belly and makes you feel all toasty inside.

Seemed reasonable to me. Except that for the first time I’d ever seen, Price Chopper had natural chicken breasts on sale for 69 cents a pound. Half the price of my standard chicken thighs and legs.

So I bought the chicken breasts (bone in, at least) and headed home arguing with them the whole way.

I know you like to be roasted, wet heat dries you out, I know, I know, call your therapist. I want broth, and, hey, I am the one with the big knife.

We finally struck a compromise: a long, salt-based marinade and then I could have my way with them.

Many of the best cooks I know are women from African and Caribbean countries. They all soak their meat in salt water, or sometimes white vinegar and water, before cooking it. It’s a light brine that tenderizes the meat. Or, in other cases, they rub the meat with salt and other spices and let it sit over night before preparing it.

I’d read in a lot of Western cookbooks that pre-salting food wasn’t a good idea because it dries out the meat. But these women make the moistest, juiciest meat I’ve ever tasted, so I'd long since decided to ignore the cookbooks and go with my kitchen mentors.

But then, last week, I checked out The Zuni Café Cookbook from the library. (Apparently this is required reading for food bloggers.) And right there in the introduction was famous chef Judy Rodgers with a whole section dedicated to the benefits of early salting.

My worlds now reconciled, I decided my best chance of not drying out the chicken breasts was salt.

I let the chicken soak in a saltwater brine for an hour and then rinsed it well. Then into a zip lock with olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and 8 lightly crushed whole garlic cloves. I let it overnight in the fridge.

Normally, I would remove the skin when braising chicken, but I was still worried about dry chicken (yes, I have issues) and so I trimmed the skin down and left a bit on the breasts. Think pasties.

The next day, I browned the chicken and garlic cloves with three thinly sliced portabello mushrooms.

Then the whole lot went into a Dutch oven with the marinade, a bunch of Greek olives, and a rinsed can of chick peas.

I let it braise in the oven for about an hour and half at 350. Just until the chicken was tender. If it had been dark meat, I would have gone for an lower temp, maybe 300, and a longer cooking time, the falling off the bone bit, but again … fear of dry chicken.

It can out well. The meat was very moist and the chick peas were tender and added to the warmth of the dish. The best part was the dipping broth.