(This is actually Exhibit 1 in the “I need a better camera” series, but we will let that slide for now).
Bread and chicken stew is the first in a series of food experiments I propose to carry out, trying new combinations of existing foods or new ingredients in the foods we all know and love. Think a dash of vanilla essence in your white rice before you cook it. Heaven? Hell? We won’t know until we try!
Bread goes with just about anything you choose to slather it with, chicken stew goes with almost every carb I can think of. But how well do the two work together? The fact that I performed this experiment because I was too lazy to cook anything at 11pm is purely coincidence, btw.
Bread and chicken stew experiment, start!
Ingredients: Leftover chicken stew, leftover “wholewheat” bread (I put wholewheat in quotes because what passes for wholewheat/brown bread in Accra is pretty much just white bread with a little bit of wheat in it.
- Slice bread
- Heat stew in microwave
- Smooth a little stew across the top of each slice of bread
- Pick out the tastiest-looking piece of chicken and put in the middle of the place
- Arrange the bread around it.
- Serve!
See, much faster than cooking rice in the middle of the night. What am I, a witch?
Verdict
Umm… 5/10, maybe? It was more than edible and even borderline delicious, but the stew made the bread soggy. The texture was rather unpleasant, to be honest. Also the four slices in the photo weren’t enough to satisfy me. You see oo, it’s not good to be lazy. But really the biggest downfall was the soggy texture, so I can think of two possible solutions:
- Toast the surface of the bread lightly before adding the sauce
- Use a drier bread like French bread or a denser bread like rye bread
- Try a chunkier sauce with less oil and fewer pureed veggies
- Try dipping the bread in the stew instead of treating it like a sandwich spread.
The easiest ones to try in the middle of the night would be Nos. 1 and 4, but maybe in the near future I can set up a proper experiment with different kinds of bread and stew, toasted and untoasted, to see which works best. Hopefully I’ll have a better camera by then as well. Until then, adios!