Chicken Confit

It is starting to become unheard of for home cooks to preserve food products, other than to shove something unceremoniously in the freezer. When I was a kid, we had a huge garden and canned a ton of the vegetables coming from it, froze other vegetables (peas and corn), made all manner of jams, jellies, and pickles, and my grandfather would butcher a hog in the fall and we preserved all kinds of things from that. Sadly, professional kitchens aside, most people no longer put up food to store it, especially meat stuffs. In particular, the art of preserving meat under fat (making confit) is almost lost.

Chicken (and Garlic) Confit out of the Oven, Cooling

I have a great fondness for charcuterie and whole animal butchery and so I have studied all kinds of ways to make use of all parts of animals, at one point having dozens upon dozens of treatises (mainly in French and mainly very old) on the subject. On retiring from the business, I donated thousands of volumes to my local culinary school, to pay it forward as it were. I am sincerely happy to see that the new generation of chefs is starting to embrace charcuterie once more.

Confit is one of the classic means of meat preservation. And as chefs can attest, duck confit is much the rage these days. No longer having access to large quantities of duck, at home, I am now limited to chicken confit, which I make in the same manner as I did duck confit at the restaurant where we made confit from many, many things other than just duck.

The French verb confire means to preserve. Originally, confiture meant fruit preserved by poaching slowly in sugar syrup. Over time and by extension, it has come to refer to meat and other non-fruit items preserved by gentle poaching in fat. The resulting confit is stored away from oxygen under fat and if it is cured with salt before being cooked, it will last a very long time without spoiling. Now of course, we all have refrigerators and we no longer confit meat to preserve it, but because we are in love with its flavor and texture.

My process for making confit (any kind of meat confit really, pork, beef, venison, chicken, duck, goose, guinea hen, salmon) begins with making a salt mixture with which to cure the meat. In the old days, meat was covered in plain salt. But people realized that not only does the salt penetrate the meat, but that spices in the salt mix will also penetrate and flavor the meat. To wit, pastrami gets a lot of flavor from black pepper and coriander while speck gets its inimitable flavor in part from juniper berries.

The next step in making confit is to let the meat cure for a time dependent on the thickness of the meat and the saltiness desired in the final product. After curing sufficiently, the salt is rinsed off and the meat is drowned in fat and poached very slowly in the oven until it is done.

Then the meat gets refrigerated under its blanket of fat, which congeals, until we are ready to eat it. At the restaurant, we confited our pork bellies for 90 days before serving them. As with fine wines and big beers, so confit benefits from a bit of aging.

Salt with Orange Zest, Thyme, Rosemary, and White Pepper

You can flavor your curing salt mix any way you see fit. For my chicken confit, I was mimicking a cure I used to do on duck, which responds brilliantly to orange flavors. So, I made a mix of a cup of salt, zest of an orange, a tablespoon of dried rosemary, a tablespoon of dried thyme, and a quarter teaspoon of white pepper.

Salted Chicken Thighs

A cup of salt will easily cure a package of 8 chicken thighs. You can see that I have rubbed the thighs, both sides, with a generous coat of the salt mix and placed them in a non-reactive pan. They will now go in the refrigerator to cure, covered, and getting turned once every 24 hours.

You might also notice that I am using thighs rather than traditional whole legs. I would use whole legs if I were serving each person a single piece of confit (and I would salt it for a far shorter period), but since I want to use the confit in small pieces à la ham, I used thighs and I skinned them, not needing the skin for presentation purposes. The skin ended us as a crispy garnish on a gnocchi dish.

Note that the longer you salt the meat, the saltier it gets (to a point) and so the length of the cure depends on how salty you want the final product to be. When curing salmon, for example, I might let it only cure for an hour. (As a total aside, I used to make a ham-like product that I called prosciutto of salmon which cured for about a week and was served in the thinnest translucent slices like a great ham.) For whole duck legs, I found 48 hours to be just about right. Similarly, that's what I did for these chicken thighs, which end up pretty salty, like country ham, which is just what I wanted.

Chicken Thighs Cured for 48 Hours

The salt changes the chicken by extracting water from it. The flesh firms and the color changes slightly. After curing, remove the chicken from the brine and rinse it quickly to remove any loose salt from the surface. Pat the chicken dry and put it in a clean ovenproof pan. Cover with melted fat, duck or goose fat being the best, but lard is also wonderfully flavorful as well. I used extra virgin olive oil in this case. Regular olive oil or canola would have worked just as well and been less expensive, but I actually plan to use the leftover oil to cook and season with, so I went with extra virgin.

Chicken (and Garlic) Ready for the Oven

Place the chicken uncovered in a slow oven, say 250F, and let it cook slowly until very tender. This pan took two-and-a-half hours. Let the confit cool, cover it, and refrigerate until ready to use. The finished confit will keep under its coat of fat for a very long time and will actually get better tasting with age, as the salt equalizes throughout the meat.