You will need a pot large enough for a whole large chicken, and a good blender or smoothie maker for the sauce.
It’s best to make this dish the day before you serve it, to allow the flavours a chance to blend and give the raw garlic and slightly bitter walnut tastes some time to calm down. The whole thing becomes a bit sweeter the next day.
As an added bonus, you will end up with a lot of good chicken stock which you can use for soup or another dish.

INGREDIENTS LIST:
For the chicken:
▢ 1 large whole chicken
▢ vegetables and herbs to flavour the stock – an onion, couple of carrots, celery stalks, parsley – or really whatever you’d like your stock to be flavoured with
▢ salt and pepper to taste for the stock
For the walnut sauce:
▢ warm stock from the poached chicken
▢ 4 cloves of garlic
▢ 350 gr of walnuts
▢ 3 slices of stale bread
▢ salt and pepper to taste
For the garnish (optional):
▢ olive oil
▢ chilli flakes
▢ walnut halves

COOKING METHOD:
Poach the chicken:
1. Place the whole chicken, vegetables, herbs, salt and pepper into a large pot, cover with water, and bring up to the boil. Once boiled, partially cover with a lid and simmer until tender enough to almost fall off the bone.
2. Let the chicken cool for a while in the pot (until just cool enough to handle, but still warm) before lifting it out.
3. Take the cooked chicken off the bone, and remove any skin.
4. Shred all the cooked chicken into a large bowl and add a ladleful of the warm stock to keep it moist. Keep it covered while you make the sauce.
Prepare the sauce:
1. Place the walnuts, stale bread (in pieces), cloves of garlic, salt and pepper into your blender.
2. Add a couple of ladles of warm chicken stock, then blend, until very very smooth. Add more stock whenever needed, then blend some more. The long, long blend is key to the creaminess of the finished sauce.
3. Mix just over half the walnut sauce you have made with the shredded chicken – make sure all the chicken pieces are covered.
4. Place the chicken into your service dish, and spread the remainder of the walnut sauce on top.
3. The dish can be served as is, or you can drizzle the top with some olive oil and chilli flakes, and decorate with walnut halves.
Serve the next day – it will blend the flavours and give the raw garlic some time to calm down:)