Chicken ballotine with dark meat

It's not unusual to bone-out a chicken and stuff it, truss it up, then cook it. The problem is that -- like turkey -- the white meat (breast) dries out before the dark meat cooks sufficiently. To solve this problem, we removed the breast meat and replace it with extra thigh meat, then ground the white meat with seasonings and use that stuffing in the center so it was protected from the heat by the rest of the bird's dark meat.

Chicken stuffed with dark meat and ground, seasoned white meat

Procedure

We made two stuffed chickens but only served one; quantities here are per bird. Bone out a whole chicken being careful to keep the skin in tact. We followed Jacque Pepin's fantastic technique shown on Youtube. It took us longer than the "less than a minute" he says it should take, but we haven't worked as line cooks for 30 years.

Boned out using Pepin's technique

We then carefully removed the breast meat, leaving the skin in tact.  We boned and skinned 2 thighs, and pounded them to make them a bit more even, and put them where the breast meat had been. 

Boned-out, breast meat removed

Use 2 boned, skinned, pounded thighs per boneless chicken

Dark thigh meat replaces white breast meat, protects the stuffing

We took some "Surryano" ham that was quite dry and ground it fine in a food processor, added 1 of the breasts, the tenders, and some shallots and garlic cooked in duck fat, fresh rosemary and processed to a paste, somewhat like a lumpy pate. We pushed that into where the bones had been in the legs and wings, and put the rest in the center on top of the thigh meat.

Ground white meat, Surryano, allium stuffing in center

We rolled it up, overlapping the skin just a bit then tied a few pieces of butcher's twine around to hold it in place.  The shape was a little awkward and the assembled ballotine a bit floppy, so I wrapped tightly in cling film to give it a dense sausage shape.  

Spineless and floppy ballotines (two chicks, we served only one)

Two compact ballotines, 1 stuffed chick each, ready for cooking

We put this into a sous vide bag and started cooking in a 60C bath, the ideal temperature for the white meat, but too low for the dark. After an hour, when the center should just about reach the 60C target, we turned up the heat to 70C so that the external layer of dark meat would get cooked sufficiently, but the temperature gradient should keep the interior at the desired cooler temperature; it cooked for another hour.

Finished cooking, a little tasty jus escaped but kept in the bag

When done, we torched it with a Searzall to brown and crisp the skin, cut into slices, and arranged on a platter. We drizzled the small amount of juices that came out in the bag onto the slices.

Torch to brown and crisp

The chicken, both dark and light, came out beautifully cooked. The roll held together pretty well, though not perfectly: thinner slices tended to want to separate at the boundaries between the different layers of meat. It was juicy and tender, not remotely dry or stringy. 

Despite the crazy heat of the Searzall, we didn't get a deeply crackly skin. Perhaps I needed to dry it out more before torching it, but this was better than the much longer time our previous trial run spent under the broiler.

This was served with a friend's excellent focaccia bread, roasted winter veggies, a bright salad, and ended with a grapefruit-rosemary sorbet.