Weeknight Moroccan Chicken with Orzo

Introducing… *drum roll*… For the first time ever… The Batter Thickens has a guest chef… the third sibling: Ethan!

My brother didn’t write this post, but he made the food and has given me lots of quotes to include, so you can hear about it directly from the chef! It may not look like fine dining, but boy was it tasty.

My family has travelled a lot over the years, and we’ve eaten many memorable meals. Which means it takes a lot for one to really stick out! But the saffron chicken pastry we had for lunch in Morocco is one of those meals that sticks with you. Maybe it was because we just didn’t know what to expect from Moroccan food, or maybe it’s just because saffron is wonderful, but it was truly amazing. It inspired my mom to look up recipes when we got home, and she found this one from Epicurious that was quite similar.

I haven’t made it often, because I haven’t been in the position to keep saffron around much. (But they sell saffron at Costco, and now I have some in the house!) My brother has made this recipe quite a lot though! He has an odd repertoire of recipes. Saffron chicken is not a typical recipe to have mastered… when the others include taco salad and salmon.

He says the only downside of this Saffron Chicken is that it’s quite a process to make. You cook the chicken by boiling it and then reducing down the broth, so it takes quite a while. And then you have to shred all the chicken, which takes another 20 minutes. So it becomes a multi-hour process. Which is great if it’s a weekend and you want a luxurious dinner! But not great for a mid-week meal that you want as low-effort and as quickly as possible.

So when he suggested we have it for dinner the other night, I tried to think of ways to cut back on the things that make it a labor-intensive recipe. The obvious substitution was to use ground chicken instead of having to shred it all by hand. And then, to reduce the cook time, adding in orzo speeds up the pace at which the broth gets absorbed. It also gets rid of the need for pastry, and helps make this feel like a full meal.

Other than those pretty large changes, it stays true to the recipe! The most important part is the spice blend, which my brother chose to double to account for the orzo being added.

Now, a few words from the chef: “I will say this was much easier to do than the traditional original recipe, which requires cutting a pound and half of chicken, which takes half an hour. I chose to babysit this, but you could chuck it in and walk away for 10 minutes at a time. With the other one, the broth was reduced down a lot, and that would take an hour or more. But because the orzo absorbs it, it skips that step.”

All-in-all, he confirmed this as a weeknight time saver: “Before, it would take like 2 and a half hours start to finish. And this one was more like 45 minutes,” and had lots of “just waiting for boiling and simmering. Adding the orzo and waiting.”

He also says that, “It gives you a lot of flexibility too I think. Like, you could still put this in a pastry. Or in a salad with some greens too. It’s good as is.”

Which is good, because of its potential for meal prep: “It would be very easy to double the whole recipe, if you’re thinking of meal prep. For one or two people, doubling this recipe is a week’s worth of food, easily.”

He’s a harsh critic of his own cooking, because he said, “I would flag the whole thing as pretty experimental as a first try, there’s somethings I’d perhaps tweak. I did like 1.75 or 2 times the spice ratio to account for the nearly three times liquid to make sure it has flavor. Even still you could add more. Maybe more salt tot bring out the flavor, or more spice, I’m not sure.” But I think the spice blend was great! I would add more salt, but that’s my note for most cooking, and I did just add a bit of salt on top of mine.

There you have it! A family classic updated to make it weeknight-friendly. The original is great though, and I may want to make it on a weekend soon, to finally try making something with saffron myself!

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