This week I decided to try another recipe from another SeriousEats food editor/person, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. I made easy skillet-braised chicken with pepper and onions with a side of roasted broccoli and garlic breadcrumbs. Both of the recipes came from his book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science. Really trying to make a better use of these books before I make an excuse to get another one.

Even though I prefer baking over cooking, I do want to get better at both and luckily, The Food Lab is there to help me with that. One thing I like about these recipes that Lopez-Alt provides an explanation behind his recipes, which helps with my goals of hopefully one day being knowledgeable enough to cook without depending on a recipe.

I tried to plan ahead and do some food prep the night before, cutting up the veggies. I tried a new technique of cutting bell peppers lengthwise, instead of cutting out the core directly from the top. I also learned that there’s a difference between pole-to-pole and orbital slicing of onions. Slicing the onions orbital/perpendicular to the poles would cut through more onion cells and cause a more pungent onion smell and change the texture of the onion slices themselves. According to this paper, Imai et al. explain that what causes you to cry (called a lachrymator) while cutting the onions is Syn-Propanethial-S-oxide, which reacts with your tear glands. This is synthesized by:

1. When cut, the onion (allium cepa) reveals a substrate called 1-propenyl-L-cysteine sulphoxide (PRENCSO) that reacts with alliinase and water, which then leads to an unstable intermediate sulphenic acid.
2. Then, the lachrymator factor synthase (LFS) kicks in and transforms the intermediate sulphenic acid into syn-propanethial-s-oxide (LF) and water causes a secondary reaction of producing thiosulphanate (what determines the onion fragrant/tasting factor)

That’s pretty cool! Also explains why I cry so much cutting onions.

Easy Braised Chicken with Peppers and Onions

While browning the chicken, I did notice that because the pieces were not flat, the skin was not evenly browned everywhere and in hindsight, it would’ve been nice to press down the pieces to get more browned surface area. Luckily, because I remembered what happened last time from the last time I had to brown chicken in batches, I made sure to clean the skillet between each batch, which prevented charred marks or burned bits being attached to the next batch of chicken. I like that the base of the sauce was basically: peppers, onions, tomatoes, stock, and white wine with some spices.

The recipe was fairly straightforward and came together quite easily. Because I wasn’t sure if my pan was oven-safe, I transferred everything to an aluminum tray which seemed to work fine. Contrary to the recipe’s instructions and because I was pressed for time, I cooked it at 150F higher of a temp than the instructed for ten minutes since I was already roasting the broccoli at that time. I also didn’t cook it for long enough and waited until the chicken hit the desired temperature of 165F before serving so the sauce was a little runny. Nevertheless, still tasty pretty good regardless. Next time, I would just cook it longer to make more of a sauce than a soup and add more salt and pepper. It taste good with pasta!

Roasted Broccoli with Garlic Breadcrumbs

This recipe was also pretty straightforward. There’s a certain method that Lopez-Alt uses when it comes to roasting veggies, which I’ve tried before with cauliflower that I ended up really liking. He even has a post about it here, which is what I used to roast the broccoli. It took twice as much longer than I expected, probably because the broccoli was a little damp going into the oven but I was still able to get good results.

Pro-tip: Season with pepper and salt more than you think.

Making breadcrumbs gave me an excuse to use the food processor, so I was pretty excited about this. Using some butter and some garlic powder (too lazy to mince), the breadcrumbs came together really quickly and simply and tasted so addicting. It was like eating garlic bread crumbs. I like the texture that it gave the broccoli. I would definitely make this again and sprinkle it onto other stuff like mashed potatoes or something.

Overall, I think the meal turned out alright. Things I would try to do next time was to start on the chicken before the broccoli and to more gracefully multitask between both dishes. I could have even cooked the chicken on the stovetop, which would have been the smarter option to go with in hindsight of the broccoli’s roasting temperature.