Redneck Roulade: hotdog farce

We were on a roll (hah!) with our ballotines and roulades, and had some extra chicken breast. For fun, we decided to do a "Redneck Roulade" -- a chicken breast stuffed not with a farce, but a simple hotdog.

It may look like a pig in a blanket, but it's a chicken blanket

We split one leftover breast with a butterfly cut, then pounded each half between cling film so they'd each accommodate a hotdog -- a Nathan's Jumbo restaurant style to be precise.

Breast butterflied and pounded to enclose the dog

We added a bit of mustard figuring it's a typical condiment for a dog, and not too uncommon in chicken preparations. We laid the breast and dog on the skin which we'd carefully saved from boning out chickens, then wrapped them tightly in a couple layers of cling film to give them shape.

Season with mustard, wrap everything with chicken skin

Shaped with cling film before bagging for sous vide

An hour in the sous vide bath between 60C and 70C cooked them through, and we chilled them in an ice bath and kept 'em in the fridge until we wanted them for dinner.

They came out of the sous vide bag is fine shape, chicken flesh firmed up around the dog as we'd hoped.  We trussed them in classic style with butcher's twine to keep the skin in close contact with the flesh, in hopes of preventing it from shrinking or separating.

Classic trussing, serious overkill

We browned them in a bit of chicken fat in a skillet, then served them with roasted winter veggies. Since they were already cooked we just needed to heat them through for serving and try and get some crispness in the skin.

Brown the skin, but don't overcook the chicken breast

As in our previous adventures, the sous vide technique kept the chicken moist and tender, definitely a good technique for such dry and mild-flavored meat. The skin didn't get nearly as crispy as we'd like, but that's been a problem in our last roulade/ballotine adventures too, whether we used a broiler or Searzall blowtorch.

Served with the trussing, like a package to unwrap