Faster Chicken Stew Casserole

More chicken stew options: Slow Cooked Chicken Stew, Coq au Vin and Chicken Fricasée (creamy French Chicken Stew, reader favourite!).

Chicken Stew – faster!

I feel like the word “stew” conjures up visions of slow cooked goodness that’s been simmering on the stove all day. And our patience is always rewarded with the deep flavours you can only achieve through slow cooking. Beef Stew, Guinness Stew, slow cooked Chicken Stew and Pot Roasts. This speedier Chicken Stew is for all the days when you want the slow cooked flavour – fast! It takes under an hour to make, and it’s loaded with plenty of veggies and potatoes swimming in a rich stew sauce! This speedier Chicken Casserole tastes like it’s been simmering all day… look at that rich sauce!!

Flavour Tricks

Here are the things in this recipe that ups the flavour quota even without slow cooking for hours:

boneless chicken thigh fillets which are juicy enough to withstand the simmering time needed for the sauce to develop beautiful flavours, but cook quicker than using bone-in chicken pieces; beef broth (stock) instead of chicken broth – beef broth has deeper flavours than chicken stock AND it gives the sauce a deeper brown colour without having to slow cook for ages; red wine – a good slug adds depth of flavour and again, adds to the rich brown colour of the sauce; and BACON. Need I explain this point? 😂

There’s a decent amount of veggies in this, so you can serve it as a meal without extra veg sides

How to make Chicken Stew

The total simmering time here is 40 minutes, compared to 1.5 hours for classic Chicken Stew made using bone-in chicken pieces. Nothing tricky or unusual with this speedier Chicken Stew – we start off browning the bacon and chicken to get all those tasty brown bits on the bottom of the pan which will form part of the flavour base for the sauce. Then cook off the veggies, add all the stew sauce ingredients, simmer for just 30 minutes until the chicken is tender, then lastly add the mushrooms and greens which don’t take long to cook.

And this is what comes off the stove:

juicy pieces of chicken; soft vegetables that have sucked up the flavour of the sauce; little pops of bacon (the BEST bite!); loads of thick, rich, dark, savoury, herb infused stew sauce.

Seriously. Just tell everyone you’ve been slaving away all day. They’ll totally believe you! – Nagi x