Pondering what to cook for the second? Try chicken fillet with bechamel sauce - a delicious and delicate dish. And resist the temptation to simplify the recipe, replacing bechamel with sour cream in a hurry. Because it is white French sauce that gives the dish a special, silky and slightly spicy taste. The creamy sauce with a hint of nutmeg is great for the chicken, and you get the perfect dish: hearty and dietary, simple to make and, moreover, worthy of a restaurant.
Yes, preparing the bechamel sauce will require some patience and time, but the result is worth it. You will fall in love with the pleasant taste of white sauce from the first tasting, and you will want to repeat the dish again and again.
Under bechamel sauce, you can make not only chicken breast, but also meat, meatballs, stuffed pasta - both stew in a pan or bake in the oven. Even for kids you can cook with a delicate sauce of meatballs or meat, only for children's dishes reduce the amount of spices.
Ingredients for Bechamel Chicken
- 2 halves of chicken fillet (about 500 g);
- 1-2 tbsp. l sunflower oil;
- 25 g butter;
- 30 g flour;
- 2 cups (i.e. 400 ml) of milk;
- salt to taste, about 1 tsp;
- 1 / 4-1 / 2 tsp. depending on the intensity of the taste you want to get.
Method of cooking chicken with bechamel sauce
Chicken breast, pre-rinsed, cut across into small pieces 1-1, 5 cm thick.
Warming up the sunflower oil in the pan, spread the chicken breast and fry, stirring until the fillet is white. Then we add salt (approximately 2/3 tsp), mix, cover with a lid and leave to stew over low heat. In the meantime, stew chicken, prepare the sauce.
It is better to boil the sauce in thick-walled non-stick dishes, such as a cast iron cauldron. You will also need another saucepan for milk.
The milk is heated so that it becomes very hot, but does not boil. At the same time, we put the cauldron on the smallest fire and put a piece of butter on its bottom. When the butter has melted, pour the flour into the cauldron and carefully stir it. It turns out a thick mass.
Without removing the cauldron from the tiny light, we begin to add hot milk - little by little, 2 tablespoons, each time carefully rubbing until homogeneous, so that no lumps remain.
So we put all the milk into the sauce. It turns out light, not very thick mass. Constantly stirring, boil the sauce for 10-15 minutes, until thick. However, do not forget to stir the chicken.
When the sauce starts to gurgle, it's almost ready. Salt (the remaining 1/3 tsp. Of salt), add nutmeg (in this spice - the whole highlight of Bechamel sauce!), Mix, boil with spices for a couple more minutes and turn it off.
Fill the chicken with the sauce, mix well and simmer under the lid on low heat for another five minutes. Fragrant chicken in white sauce is ready.
This is the basic version of the dish. You can add onions (chop and fry together), garlic (add crushed at the end of cooking, along with the sauce), bay leaf, black or fragrant peas ... But this is to your taste, choose the additives according to your preferences. And you can not add anything - the chicken with bechamel sauce itself is very tasty.
The perfect side dish for this dish is boiled rice, mashed potatoes, or pasta.
