One of my family’s favorite meals is chicken stew made a dutch oven. This great dish has few ingredients and can be made in one pot (or dutch oven).
Transcript:
One of my family’s favorite meals is chicken stew made a dutch oven. I have made this both in the woods on charcoal as well as right on the stove. Today we are making this on the stove, but there is no difference that I can tell making it on a camping trip or in your own kitchen.
This stew is our go-to stew where I usually need to make a double batch just to meet the demand of our family of four with some left overs, so doubling it and feeding a patrol of 6 or 7 is good bet.
One of the great things about this stew is it only has six ingredients, plus some oil, flour, and spices if you like. In all the times I have made this it has been flavorful enough with the natural ingredients that you can leave out the spices.
The first step is to pull together all your ingredients, which include
Boneless, skinless, Chicken thighs, Canola oil. carrots, sweet onion, baby potatoes
Garlic, Chicken stock and Flour
Many of the items can be prepped in advance if you are serving this on a camping trip.
So I start by cutting up the onions into about 6-12 wedges, and the sliced diagonally into 1/2-inch pieces. Then cut up the garlic into pieces.
If prepping for a trip, you can put the onions and carrots together into a zip lock bag, and the garlic in a second zip lock. The potatoes I use are the small baby potatoes, they usually don’t need to be cut up, but if they are larger, you can half them on site so they don’t turn color on you.
You can use any chicken broth, but I like this kind the best, it’s compact and easy to make out in the elements. It’s very potent, so when it calls for a teaspoon per cup, they really mean it, not a heaping teaspoon like you would normally add. When a receipe asks for 10 cups of broth, I will usually use about 7-8 teaspoons of the stuff.
The cooking process begins with high heat in the Dutch oven. While the recipe calls for chicken pieces, I like to leave the thighs whole and cut them up right before setting it to simmer later.
Here you brown the chicken in some oil, making sure to brown it on all sides. When it’s done, remove it from the heat and put it aside to be added back later.
Cook carrots and onions together in the dutch oven until the onions begin to soften, about 4-5 minutes.
Then add garlic and cook for about a minute, and then add a bit of chicken stock while scraping to loosen browned bits from the bottom.
Whisk flour and 1/2 cup broth in a small bowl; add to the Dutch oven, this will add some thickness. I usually will keep some extra flour around, to adjust the thickness a bit more, as the recipe by itself is a little more watery than I like.
Here, I take the chicken that has cooled a bit and roughly cut it into irregular chunks, and then add it to the pot with the rest of the chicken broth.
In about half an hour, you’re ready to add the potatoes. Everything is cooked at this point, except the potatoes, so you are really softening the carrots, and infusing the broth with the chicken.
As I mentioned if the potatoes are larger, but them up into pieces, but if they are small baby potatoes you can put them in as is. From here you are cooking for about 20 minutes, until the potatoes are tender.
This meal goes really well with some Italian or pita bread to soak up the juices, and is a great winter stew to warm you up.
Take what you like and leave the rest, and as we say in Woodbadge, feedback is a gift, leave yours below in the comments, with the hope we can all learn together.
I’m Scoutmaster Dave, and this was Dutch oven chicken stew.
