Circassian Chicken

This is slightly adapted from a traditional recipe that is common in western Russia and this is from the Ukraine. It is mildly flavoured but illustrates the different techniques used in this part of the world.

Ingredients

For 1	Continued...
1 chicken breast	freshly ground black pepper to taste
50 gm carrot (prepared weight)	75 gm walnut pieces
70 gm onion (prepared weight)	1 slice dry bread (see notes)
8 gm fresh parsley (2 tbspn finely packed)	¼ tspn paprika
¼ tspn salt

Preparation

Chop the carrot (see pic).
Chop the onion (see pic).
Chop the parsley.
Using a food processor, grind the walnuts to a paste.
Break the bread into pieces.

Cooking

Heat about 250 ml of water in a pan and add the chicken, carrot, onion, parsley, salt and pepper and simmer, stirring regularly, turning the chicken, for about 20 min until the chicken is fully cooked. The chicken will be cooked when it is cut at its fattest part and is white throughout.
Remove the chicken from the pan and shred it into pieces using 2 forks, reserving the stock.
Drain the liquid from the stock and reserve both the liquid and the solids.
Add 2 or 3 tablespoons of the liquid part of the stock to the bread until it absorbs the liquid, but do not use too much liquid at this stage.
Using a hand (stick) blender, blend together the soaked bread, walnut paste and the solid part of the stock (carrot, onion, parsley etc.) and add a little more liquid stock as needed to produce a thick paste.
Mix the shredded chicken into this paste.

Serving

Serve the chicken mixture with rice and garnish with paprika as desired and optionally a little freshly chopped parsley.

Notes

The bread would traditionally be white, although I have used granary. The bread needs to be dry in order to properly absorb the stock.

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