Green Chicken Chili - Food Wishes - Chili Recipe

hello this is chef john from food wishes comm with green chicken chili that's right don't let that drab green color or questionable plating fool you this chicken and white bean chili was incredibly delicious and surprisingly easy to make and that this came out so good is no surprise since it's based on one of my favorite all-time foods chili verde which is basically chunks of pork stewed with tomatillos so that's what inspired this and by the way just so everybody's clear this is a green chili made with chicken and not a chili made with green chicken so with that let's go ahead and get started with the aforementioned non green chicken and what I have here is about three pounds of boneless skinless chicken thighs which generally comes with little bits of fat attached here and there and you could if you want to trim that off but we're not going to and I'll explain why in a second but what we are gonna do this season both sides generously with kosher salt even though I'm only going to show you one side the other side looked remarkably similar to this and then what we'll do once our chicken thighs are seasoned it's head over to the stove where I have a dry non-stick skillet so over high heat and we'll go ahead and place in our chicken thighs and the reason we're going with a dry pan here is because as this chicken comes up the temperature that fat we were talking about earlier is gonna start to melt and that's actually gonna prove enough fat to brown this chicken in and I use the term loosely since we really don't have any skin here to get nice and brown and crisp but you'll see after about four minutes on high we should get some decent golden color and I should mention I did this in two batches since as you know when we brown things we generally don't like your crowd the pan but anyway we'll go ahead and brown those thighs off about 4 minutes per side and once done we'll transfer those into a bowl to cool and once those do cool down to room temp we'll go ahead and chop them up into whatever size pieces we want and sure if you want you could cut up the chicken raw and brown it that way but I think the texture and appearance is better if you do it this way Plus cutting up cooked chicken thighs is significantly more enjoyable than cutting up raw chicken thighs so we'll go ahead and wait for that chicken to cool down and while we do we'll move on to make our sauce featuring the star of the show and massive time saver a jar of what's sold as salsa verde and this stuff goes by many names but what we're looking for is a tomatillo bay salsa and how you know is you're gonna check the ingredients and the first ingredient must be two mattias followed by probably onions and chilies or if has a bunch of weird stuff in there don't use it and I'll give more info about this on the blog so we'll go ahead and add 1 24 ounce jar that followed by some kind of fire roasted green chilies which could be jarred or canned or in my case I had a package of frozen hatch chilies which I thought about that very popular can variety at the market will work and we'll go ahead and add that to the blender along with a few cloves of peeled garlic as well as one sliced up jalapeno pepper that I remove most but not all of the seeds and membranes and we'll go ahead and finish up with a nice big handful of freshly pick cilantro stems and leaves by the way the stems tastes exactly the same and believe it or not that's it once all that's in there we'll head over and blend this up and as usual we'll start off on low and finish on high until the mixture is very smooth and extremely green and that's it our sauce is prepped we will simply set that aside and move on to cutting up our chicken which by now should be cool enough to handle and what I'll do using a cleaver and some tongs so I don't have to wash my hands before I move the camera is cut this chicken up into some bite-sized pieces and for me I shoot for about one inch cubes but literally any size will work from finely diced to not cutting them at all so you're gonna have to decide what size to make yours I mean you are after all the uncle Billy of your chili but one thing to keep in mind the smaller you cut it the faster it's gonna cook but anyway I'm gonna go ahead and cut up mine as shown and the great thing about using a cleaver is it actually doubles as a bench scraper it makes it really easy to transfer this back into the bowl and then once that said we can head to the stove and finish this chili off so we will transfer our cut chicken into this saucepan along with any and all accumulated juices which there should be a lot of and speaking of rich delicious gelatinous juices that's exactly why I use chicken thighs instead of chicken breasts for this but yes if you have two breasts will work and under protest I will tell you how to do that in the blog post but anyway we'll add our chicken as well as our sauce which is one of the most beautiful green colors you'll ever want to see and oh how I wish it would stay like that but as you'll see it doesn't which is still ok and besides our sauce base will also have to season this up with a whole bunch of ground i'm also gonna toss in a spoon at chipotle pepper because i'm tired of using cayenne + this has some nice smokiness to it and yes of course I'm kidding about the Cayenne but not about adding some freshly ground black pepper and then 2 ingredients so secret I had to blur the screen actually I think the autofocus on my lens is broken that was really some dried oregano and salt but anyway we'll go ahead and season that up as well as rinse out our blender with a splash of water and add that and we'll go ahead and stir all this together as well as set our heat to medium-high and then from there we will use our standard stewing technique which means once it starts to bubble we will back our heat down to medium-low and we'll go ahead and simmer this relatively gently stirring occasionally for about an hour or so or until our chicken is tender as of course determined by you and again that's going to depend on how big you cut it and as I've already warned you as this simmers that beautiful bright green color is going to sort of turn into a more drab olive green but while we'll lose a little that vibrant color the good news is all those vibrant a stay intact so I let mine simmer for about an hour until my chicken was nice and tender and I didn't guess I tested it with a fork and then once we determined our chickens ready we will go ahead and add the last major ingredients a couple cans of white beans that have been drained and rinsed and we'll go ahead and stir those in and basically as soon as those he through you can technically serve but I generally like to let that simmer for at least 15 minutes or so since those starches from the beans tend to thicken up the chili a little more so that's what I did and about 15 to 20 minutes later I decided that was enough it was time to eat but before that happens of course we have to check our seasoning and we're mostly checking for salt but maybe you wanted a little hotter who knows so check it out and then assuming we're happy with the seasonings we'll go ahead and grab a ladle and serve some of this up into a warm bowl and right here you can get a great look at that final texture and what I think is the perfect thickness and by the way if you want yours a little thinner throw in some chicken stock that's just you cooking but anyway we'll go ahead and ladle that up and then we will add a big old dollop of sour cream and then because we were feeling a little insecure about the color we'll try to hide that with a few slices of avocado which ironically just made that Chili's color look less green but anyway I continued on by sprinkling over some pumpkin seeds because they're green and also a common ingredient in Mexican cooking except after I did and finished off with a sprig of cilantro and took some pictures I decided I didn't like the seeds since they looked like something somebody accidentally dropped on top so I flicked those off and continued down and felt a little better and then I grabbed a spoon and dug in and felt a lot better because this really is one of the most delicious Chile's you'll ever want to taste I mean I really do love red and white Chili's but there's just something so deliciously different about this green sauce and how well it works with those tender chunks of chicken and of course white beans and while this stuff really is amazing enough to yell by itself it's even more vantastic if you eat this with some corn bread or better yet some beautiful warm homemade corn tortillas which I'm hoping to show you how to make very soon so consider yourselves teased but anyway that's it what I'm calling green chicken chili now was standing at having not the most gorgeous green color in the world I really do love everything about this chili except please do yourself a favor and do not sprinkle over any pumpkin seeds since above and beyond their appearance the texture was all wrong all right it was almost like there was little undercooked beans in there or some kind of little pieces of chicken gristle so do not under any circumstances add that to yours but besides that I really do hope you give this great chili a try soon so head over to food wishes comm for all the ingredient amounts of more info as usual and as always enjoy you you

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 307,355

Keywords: Chili, Chicken, Green, white, bean, recipe, chilies, chef, john, food, wishes, cooking, soups, stews, winter, cold, comfort, mexican, spanish

Id: Kr5YI8PD5ic

Length: 8min 44sec (524 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/iDisc]

This is intriguing. I honestly had never heard of green chili before.

[u/gmips]

I made this today and it was incredible! Highly recommend.