Poached Egg & Pepper Chicken | Eataly Challenge

Poached eggs, red bell pepper, and… CHICKEN? Not a combination I would have thought to put together. I’m used to whisking my eggs up for a cake or cracking them into an omelette not using them poached with chicken. But, I am always up for a challenge and that’s the point of us following Eataly: Contemporary Italian Cooking after all.

Paul has poached eggs on several occasions so I got the lesson on egg poaching. Now that I am an expert I could maybe recreate this dish without his help. That being said, this recipe had a page full of steps so I’d rather have the extra hand! On top of cooking an entire chicken in the roasting pan and using it for stock and breasts, we had to poach the eggs and make the red pepper sauce.

You have to give yourself plenty of time for this recipe because the chicken stock alone takes two hours before you get anywhere near the rest of the recipe. For those of you who work during the day, I’d highly recommend either preparing stock ahead of time or giving yourself at least a half a day to get this recipe where it needs to be for dinner.

Once every step of the recipe is complete and you wind up with a plate full of red pepper, you’re ready to eat… and only then do you realize the poached egg is too cold. We followed the recipe to a T so I’m not sure why it cooled off so quickly. Though the sauce and chicken was still very tasty, I would have loved for it to be warmer.

The salad we paired it with was the Cannellini Bean and Pecorino Cheese Salad with Balsamic Vinegar and I have to say I was not a big fan. The texture was a bit too soft for a salad and the beans didn’t come out the way I’d hoped. I loved the idea of combining these ingredients I just didn’t love how it turned out having them all together.