Chicken in Paprika Sauce

Flour and butter in equal weight, 25g to 25g, is just the ratio for a basic white roux — any cookbook calls it that, nobody needs mysticism here. The two cook together for less than a minute, enough that the flour loses its raw, pasty smell — if you've ever bitten into a sauce and tasted something faintly like wallpaper paste, that's flour that went into liquid without ever meeting fat and heat first. Whisk it, don't stir, because a whisk breaks up any lump the moment it forms; a spoon just pushes lumps around.

Stock here is doing a job double cream alone can't: double cream is rich but flat, no backbone, no savoury depth. Stock gives the sauce something to taste of besides fat and paprika. Use a proper stock if you have it — chicken, since that's what's in the pan — but a good stock cube dissolved in water works; nobody making a Tuesday dinner needs to have simmered bones all weekend. What you shouldn't do is swap stock for water, because then the sauce is cream, flour, and paprika, and it tastes like all three separately rather than one thing.

Tomato paste — the concentrated kind, from a tube or a small tin, not passata — gives acidity and a dark savoury edge that balances the cream's richness and rounds off the brown sugar's sweetness. The sugar is there for exactly one reason: paprika and tomato paste both lean slightly bitter and sharp when cooked, and a single teaspoon of sugar takes the edge off without making the dish taste of dessert. Leave it out and the sauce is edible but harsher than it needs to be; nothing dramatic, just thinner-tasting.

Garlic and onion are grated, not chopped — that matters more than it sounds. Grated, they break down into the sauce entirely, no bite of raw onion left anywhere, no fishing out a stray clove. If you only have garlic powder or dried onion, use less than you think, because dried aromatics concentrate fast and burn bitter if they hit the hot roux directly rather than the liquid.

Chicken breast, cut into thick strips rather than thin ones, so it survives both the hot fry and the ten-minute simmer in sauce without drying into string. Thigh meat works too, and forgives a slightly longer simmer better than breast does, if you prefer it or if that's what's in the fridge — just know it changes the texture, softer, a touch more fat.

For the oil: anything with no flavour of its own and a reasonably high smoke point does the job — a flavourless vegetable oil, a light olive oil, not an extra virgin one, which burns bitter at frying heat and wastes its own good flavour in the process. The butter alongside it isn't decorative; oil alone fries cleanly but butter browns the surface of the chicken faster and deeper because of the milk solids in it, which is the actual mechanism behind that deep gold crust everyone's after and nobody explains.

The rice, broccoli and beans are the quiet part of the dish, and the only real instruction worth repeating is: don't drown the broccoli and beans. Covering the pan and giving them two minutes in boiling water is enough to take the rawness off without boiling the green out of them — any longer and you get khaki florets that taste of nothing, which is the single most common way people ruin vegetables in this country, out of habit more than intention. Keep them under a lid off the heat afterwards and they stay hot without overcooking further; that's the whole trick, no magic in it.

Patience here is short but real — ten minutes of simmering isn't negotiable down to five because you're hungry. That's the time the chicken needs to finish cooking through in the sauce rather than staying pink near the bone of the strip, and the time the sauce needs to thicken to the point it coats a spoon rather than runs off it.