Excellent, comforting stew, well proportioned, rich flavour, warming and hearty without being stodgy. Big fan. The parsnips were nearly omitted, which would have been a grave error such was their importance to my enjoyment. Well done parsnips.
You can’t really go wrong with a check stew given enough time in a pot to be honest, but you can do many things to elevate it.
Use a good, proper stock, for one, in this case made with a multi cooker, initially pressured for the briefest time to quickly bring things to temperature, then slow cooked for like… 6 hours or more. It’s important to remove the bulk off the meat from the chicken after an hour or so though. Obviously you could use stock cubes, but I believe this would be considerably detrimental.
Properly brown off the chicken skin, is another. The recipe actually suggests going skinless, but I like properly rendered chicken skin in a stew. Tastes do vary, however.
There is a tip at the end to leave it uncovered and off the heat for a while. I think this is golden, in fact, and should be followed for any such dish (stews, soups, curries, ragus, etc). Lets the temperature drop a couple of degrees and allows some “thickening” to finish the sauce.
