Chicken breast roulade

We're testing techniques for making a porchetta-like chicken and came up with this chicken breast stuffed with chicken for dinner. It turned out reasonably well but there's room for improvement.

Self-stuffed chicken with roasted potatoes and farmers market beans

Procedure

I deboned a chicken, removed the skin from the breast, and butterflied the breast to give myself a wider area to stuff. I then pounded it between sheets of cling film to a roughly square shape, and then trimmed all the rough bits.

We had some "Surryano" ham which is quite dry but intensely flavored and processed it to crumbs, then added some cloves of garlic, a shallot, and fresh sage. I then added the trimmings and some other white meat from deboning the chicken and processed to a coarse paté-like paste.

I laid this stuffing down the center of the expanded breast, rolled it up, wrapped the skin around, and trussed with butcher's twine it to form a cylinder.  I then wrapped it tightly in cling film and rolled to make a tight cylinder and put it into a sous vide bag and vacuumed it.

The next day, we cooked it sous vide for 2 hours at 60C, removed it, then threw it under the broiler to crisp the skin.

Results

Irene said it was dry but I didn't, or maybe just a tad. The garlic and sage were quite pronounced, too much so.  Broiling took longer than expected and might have dried out the flesh a bit.

What did we learn?

For chicken breast, I could drop the temperature a couple degrees.

The ground stuffing had a good consistency, we didn't need to use a meat grinder. Happily, it held together well and bonded to the outer meat pretty well.

The alliums need to be cooked before adding to the stuffing ingredients -- the taste was too raw.  Back-out the sage.

Changes for the polletta

The "polletta" (or is it "chicketta"?) will be dark meat on the outside, so we'll have to bump up the temperature a bit.  Since we don't want to overcook the white-meat stuffing, we could cook it near the same 60C, then crank it up a bit for the final period to cook the external dark meat a bit higher, but (hopefully) use the temperature gradient to prevent the increased heat getting to the white-meat stuffing.

The alliums will be cooked, and we can use some rendered chicken or duck fat to add moisture to the stuffing.

The polletta will be a deboned chicken, whole, so won't roll into a neat sausage-shape.  That will prevent it from broiling evenly so we can use the Searzall to blast it after it comes out of its bath.