Creamy mustard and mushroom chicken thighs
- Preparation 40 min
- Refrigeration 3 to 4 days
- Cooking 55 min
- Servings 4
- Freezing Absolutely
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🍗 Thighs, never breasts
Two pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs. Nothing else. A breast dries out in a sauce that simmers for forty-five minutes. A thigh melts into it.
And no, this is not a fast weeknight thing you throw in a pressure cooker. It is food you cook when friends are coming over. An hour and thirty-five minutes from cutting board to table, morel soak included. I own that.
🍄 Three mushrooms in one sauce
Dried morels rehydrated for thirty minutes in hot chicken broth, finely chopped oyster mushrooms, sliced white mushrooms. Three textures that have nothing in common, in one pot. This is where the dish is won.
And the soaking broth never goes down the drain. All of it goes back into the sauce, carrying everything the morels left behind. If mushrooms are your thing, I also have my best cream of mushroom soup and my mushroom risotto.
🥃 One of the first recipes on this site
This one is among the very first recipes I ever put online, and it had not been touched since. It is where I fell in love with cooking, with food, with food photography. Everything started here.
The dark rum deglaze comes from that same era. Back then I put booze in absolutely everything. The fun part with alcohol is that it adds a lot of deep flavour. This is a decadent plate. Serve it to friends with a seriously good bottle of wine and watch them lose their minds.
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🍄 The number one mistake: skipping the morel soak
This is the part people get wrong, over and over. Dried morels do not go straight into a sauce. They need thirty minutes in hot chicken broth to become mushrooms again. Skip it and you end up chewing leather in a sauce that tastes like nothing.
Give them a quick rinse under cold water first. Quick, not a bath, just enough to knock the grit out of the honeycomb. After that the broth goes back into the sauce as is, unstrained. That is where the flavour lives. Straining it would mean throwing out half the recipe.
🍺 Which beer, and which one to stay away from
A Belgian style blond ale. Low bitterness, a little spice, it melts into the cream without stepping on anything. A wheat beer works too.
No IPA. Ever. The sauce reduces at a hard boil for ten to fifteen minutes at the end, and bitterness does not cook off with the liquid, it concentrates. An IPA that smells great going into the pot comes out twice as bitter on the plate, on top of mustard that already bites.
🌡️ 175°F (80°C), not 165
The chicken breast rule does not apply to thighs. Thigh collagen needs to climb higher before it lets go. At 175°F (80°C) the meat pulls apart on its own.
💰 If morels are too expensive
You can make this without them. Any other bag of dried mushrooms does the same job in the broth for a fraction of the price. Soak it the same thirty minutes, keep the liquid.
🐰 This is not my mustard rabbit
People mix the two up because the words look alike. They are completely different dishes. My mustard, beer and tarragon rabbit goes in the oven and gets basted. This one simmers on the stove, covered, for thirty minutes before it reduces uncovered. Two techniques, two evenings.
❄️ Freezing it, and the sauce that separates
Absolutely, it freezes. And yes, thawing it can make the sauce separate a little. That is fine. You do not thaw a dish to serve it to guests, you thaw it to eat it yourself.
In the fridge it keeps three to four days. Reheat it in a pan, in the microwave, or in the oven in an aluminum dish. All three work.
✅ What do I serve with my creamy mustard and mushroom chicken thighs?
Egg noodles. Nothing fancy, the ones out of the bag, boiled in salted water. They pick up the sauce better than anything else. Next to that, green beans, sugar snap peas or snow peas, blanched, for the crunch the plate is missing otherwise.
If it is the mushrooms you are after more than the chicken, go look at my best cream of mushroom soup and my mushroom risotto. And to stay in creamy sauce territory with another meat, there are my pork chops with creamy mushroom sauce.
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Ingredients
- 2 cups (500 ml) chicken broth
- 1 oz (30 g) dried morels
- 2 tablespoons (30 ml) butter
- 2 lb (900 g) chicken thighs, boneless and skinless
- Salt and ground pepper
- 1 Spanish onion, finely chopped
- 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
- 8 oz (227 g) oyster mushrooms, chopped
- 8 oz (227 g) white mushrooms, sliced
- Olive oil
- 1/4 cup (60 ml) dark rum
- 1/2 cup (125 ml) Belgian style blond ale
- 3 teaspoons (15 ml) cornstarch diluted in 3 teaspoons (15 ml) cold water
- 1/2 cup (125 ml) 15% country-style cream
- 3 teaspoons (15 ml) Dijon mustard
- Leaves from 2 fresh thyme sprigs
- Egg noodles
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Preparation
- Remove the morels from their packaging and rinse them quickly and gently under cold water to clean them. Bring the chicken broth to a boil then remove from heat. Add the morels in the broth and leave for 30 minutes to rehydrate them.
- In a large pot, melt the butter at medium-high heat. Sear the chicken on all sides, about 5 minutes total. Season with salt and pepper. Remove chicken then set aside.
- Add the onion, garlic, fresh mushrooms and a good drizzle of olive oil, then cook for 3 minutes while stirring regularly. Deglaze with the rum and scrape the bottom to get all those flavors! Add the chicken back.
- Add the broth with morels, beer, cornstarch mix, cream, Dijon mustard and the thyme leaves. Season with salt and pepper then stir well.
- Lower heat slightly, cover then simmer for 30 minutes. Stir halfway through.
- Remove lid, crank heat to mid-high and bring to a boil. Simmer at big boil for about 10-15 minutes to reduce, stir delicately. Verify the chicken doneness before removing pan from heat: internal temperature should reach 175°F (80°C).
- Serve on egg noodles with green beans, sweet peas or snow peas!
It does two things here. Half a cup of blond ale brings malt sweetness and a touch of yeasty spice that rounds off the Dijon mustard, so the sauce is not just sharp and creamy. And as the sauce reduces at a hard boil, that malt concentrates and gives the whole thing a backbone the broth alone never had.
It is not enough beer to taste like beer. It is enough to notice when it is missing.
A Belgian style blond ale, low on bitterness. It gives you fruit and a little spice without ever taking over. A wheat beer is fine too.
Stay away from IPAs. This sauce reduces hard at the end and bitterness concentrates instead of mellowing out.
175°F (80°C). Higher than the 165°F everyone quotes for breasts, and that is on purpose: thigh meat is full of collagen and it needs the extra heat to break down and go tender. Check it before you pull the pot off the heat.
Yes. The sauce may separate a little on the way back, and that is not a problem. You do not thaw a dish to serve it to guests, you thaw it to eat it yourself. In the fridge it holds three to four days.
Egg noodles, plain and simple. Nothing from scratch needed, the bagged ones soak up the sauce perfectly. Add green beans or snow peas for colour and crunch.
If you want to push the mushroom side further, my mushroom risotto and my best cream of mushroom soup are in the same family.
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