What it is
Chicken in a creamy, savoury Marmite-and-parmesan sauce. The Marmite is hidden in the sauce, doing the long-savoury-back-note work that a slow-reduced stock would otherwise do, except this version takes twenty-five minutes start to finish.
This is a proper weeknight recipe. It is not a novelty Marmite dish. The Marmite is functional rather than decorative, and the resulting chicken is genuinely better than the cream-and-mustard variants it superficially resembles.
Ingredients (for four)
- Four chicken breasts, skin on
- One tablespoon olive oil
- One large onion, finely chopped
- Two cloves garlic, crushed
- One tablespoon Marmite (yes, a whole tablespoon, the dose is right)
- Two hundred millilitres low-salt chicken stock
- One hundred and fifty millilitres crème fraîche
- Fifty grams parmesan, freshly grated
- A handful of chives, chopped, to garnish
- Salt, black pepper
A nonstick frying pan with a lid is the right tool.
Method
Pat the chicken dry, season the skin side with salt and pepper. Heat the oil in the pan over medium-high. Lay the breasts in skin-side down. Brown for five minutes, untouched, until the skin is properly golden and crisp. Flip, brown the other side for two minutes. Remove the chicken to a plate.
Drop the heat to medium. Add the chopped onion to the same pan and soften for five to seven minutes, stirring through the chicken fat. Add the garlic, cook for another minute.
Stir in the tablespoon of Marmite. It will resist for a second, then dissolve into the onions. Pour in the stock, stir until smooth. Stir in the crème fraîche. Stir in the parmesan. The sauce will go from thin to silky in about thirty seconds.
Return the chicken to the pan, skin-side up so the skin stays crisp. Spoon a little of the sauce over the meat, not over the skin. Reduce the heat, cover with a lid, simmer for fifteen to twenty minutes, until the chicken is cooked through (the juices should run clear when a sharp knife goes into the thickest part of the breast).
Lift the chicken to plates. Stir the sauce one more time, check the seasoning (it will probably need black pepper but not salt, the Marmite and parmesan have already covered that). Spoon the sauce around the chicken.
Garnish with the chopped chives.
What to serve with it
Mashed potatoes, properly. The sauce is built for mash. A pile of buttery potato, the chicken on top, sauce ladled over. Steamed broccoli or green beans on the side.
If you want to go lighter: buttered orzo, or a pile of plain rice. The starchy element matters because it has to absorb the sauce. Salad alone is not enough.
Notes
The tablespoon of Marmite is correct. A teaspoon would be too little for this dish, because the cream and the parmesan both need a counter-weight. If you halve everything for two people, halve the Marmite to one and a half teaspoons.
Do not use Greek yoghurt instead of crème fraîche. It will split when it meets the hot pan. Crème fraîche is structurally more forgiving.
Use the skin. Yes, you can do this with skinless breasts, but the rendered chicken fat in the pan is what gives the sauce its base, and skin-on browned chicken is properly the right move.
Source: BBC Good Food, adapted for the right Marmite dose.
