Cacciatore The Hunter

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Bartolome Beacham

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Aug 3, 2024, 5:54:18 PM8/3/24

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Cacciatore: The Hunter (Italian: Il cacciatore) is an Italian television series[1][2] based on the autobiographical book Cacciatore di mafiosi by magistrate Alfonso Sabella. It originally aired on Rai 2 in March 2018.[3]

In a small saucepan, heat the stock along with the porcini to soften, 10 to 15 minutes. Scoop out the mushrooms and chop them, reserving the soaking liquid in the pan.

Season the chicken with salt and black pepper on both sides and dredge lightly in flour. In a large Dutch oven, heat the oil (2 turns of the pan) over medium-high heat. Working in two batches, add the chicken and brown until crispy on both sides. Transfer the chicken to a plate.

To the pan drippings, add the cremini and cook until browned. Add the onion, garlic, and red pepper flakes and stir to soften, 5 to 6 minutes. Add the wine, stir to deglaze the pan, and cook to reduce by half. Hand-crush the tomatoes as you add them to the pan, then add the juices from the cans. Add the roasted pepper (if using), basil, and chopped reconstituted porcini. Carefully pour in the mushroom-soaking liquid, leaving the last few spoonfuls in the pan as grit may have settled there. Cook the sauce at a gentle bubble for 20 to 30 minutes to thicken a bit.

Return the chicken to the pan and simmer until the chicken is cooked through, 20 to 30 minutes.

Transfer the chicken to a warm serving platter and cover with half the sauce. Garnish with the parsley.

Pass extra sauce at the table.

TIP
I LIKE TO SERVE cacciatore with hearty whole wheat or farro spaghetti. Cook 1 pound pasta in boiling salted water and reserve 1 cup of the starchy cooking water before you drain it. Then toss the drained pasta with 2 tablespoons butter, half the cacciatore sauce, lots of grated pecorino cheese, and the starchy water. To serve the pasta as a first course, just cover the chicken with foil and keep it warm in a low oven.

This hearty Italian chicken recipe originated in central Italy, but this specific recipe is more true to a northern Italian chicken cacciatore, which uses onions, celery, and carrots for the base of flavor. If you were to make one more traditional to southern Italy, you would find ingredients such as anchovies, capers, or olives.

Season and brown the chicken thighs. First, season the chicken thighs with a healthy pinch of salt and pepper on both sides. Then brown in the pan with olive oil for about 3 minutes on each side. Then remove the chicken and transfer them to a plate.

Saut the vegetables. In the same pan as the chicken, without cleaning the pan, saut the onions, diced peppers, celery, and carrots for 3 minutes with 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Then add the chopped mushrooms and garlic, and cook for another 4 minutes or until the veggies are soft and cooked down.

Bake. Do your best to nestle the chicken into the vegetables and tomatoes, and spoon the sauce over the thighs. Cover and bake at 350F for 50 minutes, then uncover and bake for another 20 minutes. Then serve with fresh basil and parmesan cheese!

Use dark meat for cacciatore. Since this recipe is braised for quite some time, dark meat (chicken thighs and legs) will be more forgiving. They can handle being cooked for an extended period; the results are tender and perfect. White meat, such as breast or chicken cutlets, can produce a dry chicken. For more flavor, you can use bone-in chicken thighs.

Freezing chicken cacciatore: let the chicken cool completely, then store the chicken and the sauce in a freezer-friendly bag. Remove all the air and seal tight, then freeze for 1-2 months.

Pasta (and lots of parmesan). A very traditional pairing is serving cacciatore with pasta and lots of fresh parmesan! Any shape of pasta works, but we love small shapes that catch the sauce well, like small shells, radiatore, or reginetti (pictured in the recipe). To make it healthier, we serve it with whole wheat pasta, but you can also use your favorite gluten-free pasta too!

I made this tonight just as a recipe said to and it was delicious! I did put in some Chardonnay and I also tucked some sausages in and they were very delicious as well. Great suggestion! I served it over rice. Thank you for delicious recipe.

Ordinarily I do not care so much about what the formal titles of food preparations mean. I want the food to taste good and that's about it. But I find the implications of "cacciatore" incredibly appealing right now, stuck inside, in a world exactly the size of my home, surrounded in all directions by snow and ice and coronavirus and not really able to go anywhere for a whole host of reasons. I like best of all the mental image of cooking at an actual fire, in a cold but not snowbound forest, outside of some town; it's a way to transport myself, even if only imaginarily, to an experience of cold weather and seclusion from the nice stuff of society that I could actually aspire to, instead of resenting. It's fun. It's a nice little vacation.

What I'm advocating for in this blog, however, is a way to do it that allows you to indulge in the fantasy that you are cooking something hunter style, or anyway in a style that you can imagine might possibly work in some probably ridiculous vision of what a hunt could be, in an absolutely fictional idea of some rustic Italian fantasy that never existed and could never exist. A psychotic break, if you will. But a welcome one. I understand perhaps you are not here to be ushered through a florid delusion of cooking food in the woods, but unfortunately for you I am part-owner of this damn website and can do as I please. Let's cook some chicken cacciatore.

I urge you to divide your cacciatore ingredients into two groups. The first group is Things You Brought Along On Your Imaginary Hunting Trip Into The Woods Or Whatever. Imagine your (jaunty, cool, possibly leather) bag that you have brought along on your simple, rustic hunting venture. Does it have a chicken in it? No it does not, because that would be kind of gross, but more importantly because then you could not describe what you are doing as "hunting," but rather "bringing some groceries into the woods for no reason." Therefore the chicken will go in the second group.

But you can imagine that you brought along a big yellow onion and a few cloves of garlic, anticipating that you would be cooking cacciatore. Cut the onion into thick strips, French style; peel the garlic and slice it or give it a rough chop. Do not mince it! You do not have a nice cutting board with you on your imaginary hunting trip. You are just hacking up the garlic with a pocket knife.

You can imagine that you brought along a lil' tin of anchovy fillets packed in olive oil. What self-respecting (entirely imaginary) cool old-timey Italian hunter guy would leave anchovy fillets behind on a jaunt into the woods? None. Speaking of olive oil, your bag also has a small bottle of olive oil in it. You can imagine that your bag has a bottle of cheap wine in it. Is it white wine, or red? It's your frickin' imagination, buddy! Either is fine; I prefer white for this. You can imagine that your bag had room for one modest-sized can of whole peeled tomatoes in it. Not the frickin' 90-ounce can that is like a boulder! This is not smooth Sunday tomato sauce that just happens to have chicken in it instead of meatballs and spare ribs and such. It is a whole different thing! This is chicken braised in stuff that happens to include tomato. The 28-ounce can is the absolute biggest you can go for here.

Now, look into your imaginary bag. Does your bag have a pound of dried pasta in it? I submit that it does not, for the simple reason that you are not frickin' Samwise Gamgee, and therefore you did not lug a freaking pasta pot with you into the wilderness, and you simply are not allowed to crunch dry pasta on any deranged vision-quest led by me. But! Your bag may in fact have a modest loaf of crusty bread in it! That is "the hunter's starch food," as they say in the fake-European old-timey society of the mind.

Many cacciatore preparations, including perhaps the most authentic and traditional of them, include sliced peppers. If you want to include sliced peppers, include sliced peppers! Later on, when we get to the part where you're cooking onions, include your sliced peppers. It's fine! For me, cacciatore is a sort of hearty, autumnal if not wintery food, and peppers are more of a summery type of deal, so I leave them out.

That's it for the stuff you brought with you. All the rest of the ingredients belong to the second group: What You Can Imagine Finding In Your Wise, Expert Foraging Of The Beautiful Imaginary Forest. You can "forage" for some mushrooms, and wash (in the babbling brook!) and slice them. You can find some rosemary and some thyme, nice wintery herbs that for whatever reason seem more plausible as things to find in the woods than, say, parsley or basil. And you can find some chicken. Let's talk about that very briefly.

Obviously the most faithful imagining of this scenario will involve a whole bird, sectioned into parts; after all, if you are hunting for a bird to eat, it is likely to be a whole bird, and not a twitching nightmare mass of only the tastiest of bird parts. If that's what you want to do, that's fine. On the other hand, it has probably been like 5,000 years since anybody had to "hunt" for a chicken, so we are not exactly sticking to the most rigorous possible scenario, here. In any event nothing much good has ever come from braising a chicken breast. Personally, my recommendation is that you get a few bone-in skin-on chicken thighs, and a few chicken drumsticks, and use those, because that is the tastiest and most satisfying way to go. Plan on a thigh and a drumstick (or a dark-meat chicken quarter!) for each person.