Galantine is forcemeat wrapped and cooked in poultry skin (usually chicken). This project strikes me as intimidating as one must debone a chicken, keeping the skin intact. I’m writing this article to demystify galantine and give my readers (and me) the courage to try this recipe at home. Okay, let’s get started with defining a couple of terms, looking at the basic steps and then getting into how to accomplish each of the 20 steps involved in creating this dish!
This guide to making galantine at home and impressing everybody includes:
• Defining terms: Galantine, roulade and galantina.
• 20 steps (with details!) for making galantine.
Let’s get those definitions out of the way so we can dig into the process of making a galantine.
Defining terms: What is a galantine?
According to Garde Manger: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen, Fourth Edition, The Culinary Institute of America defines galantine as, “Boned meat (usually poultry) that is stuffed into its own skin, rolled, poached, and served cold, usually in aspic.”
However, we don’t have to be limited by this definition. Though galantines are generally associated with poultry, they can also be made with seafood, veal, liver and beef. There are dessert galantines made of chocolate and other such sweet ingredients—but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Defining terms: What’s the difference between a galantine and a roulade?
A galantine is forcemeat rolled up in poultry skin and poached; a roulade is forcemeat rolled up in cheesecloth or plastic wrap before poaching. With a roulade, you can also use sliced meat as the outer layer before rolling it into the cheesecloth. Galantines are more so associated with poultry, but roulades can be made of many types of meat. As for the coming together part of the process, galantines are generally folded together so the skin seam is slightly overlapped (and it looks like a meat tube). You can do this with a roulade, or you can roll it up like a jelly roll. Galantines and roulades both have dessert varieties but we’re not talking about those here.
Defining terms: What’s the difference between galantina and galantine?
Galantinas and galantines are both forcemeat dishes stuffed in chicken skin. Galantina is the Filipino version of galantine and is a popular dish to make for Christmas eve. Galantina can be tube-shaped galantine or it can be a (mostly) deboned chicken stuffed with forcemeat. This ends up looking like a stuffed chicken, not a roll. Jainey Sison’s Chicken Galantina recipe shows you how to make this Filipino Christmas dish.
Okay, now that we’ve got a few definitions out of the way, let’s move onto the 20 steps to making galantine at home and impressing everybody!
Step 1 for making galantine: Choose your recipe and timeline
Like with many of these French forcemeat dishes, you can do it the hard way or the easy way. The general instructions in this article lean towards the hard way to give you an idea of the whole process.
If you’re not put off by all these steps, you can follow Peter Hertzmann’s Galantine de Poularde: A Recipe with Comments. According to Peter’s website, he’s obsessed with French cookery so you can guess he won’t cut any corners.
“A galantine is not a last-minute dish. Depending on what items the chef has on hand and what has to be specially prepared, the finished dish can take up to a week to prepare.”
Peter Hertzmann
The other recipes I’ve looked at don’t call for a week of preparation. But two days is standard—make it on day one, eat it on day two, after the flavours have time to gel.
Also keep in mind when you’re choosing a recipe that some recipes use the term galantine but they’re actually ballotines. A ballotine is a baked version of galantine which is served hot (and you can make and eat it on the same day). The Chicken Galantine recipe by Good Food, Australia’s Home of the Hats, is an example of this. You can also have a look at Jacques Pepin’s Chicken Ballotine Stuffed with Spinach, Cheese and Bread Stuffing. (Jacques wouldn’t call a ballotine a galantine!)
While it’s good to know the difference between a galantine, roulade and ballotine, when it comes to choosing your recipe, it doesn’t matter which one you go with. However, in my internet search, I found that most galantine recipes are actually baked ballotines.
So, if you want a French galantine experience, you can try Peter Hertzmann’s recipe mentioned above or Jane Grigson’s galantine recipe which is in her book, Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery. If you’ve got another simmered galantine recipe up your sleeve, I’d love to hear about it.
Step 2 for making galantine: Gather your ingredients
Unless you keep your kitchen stocked so you’re ready for any and all forcemeat recipes, you’ll probably need to go grocery shopping before you can take on the galantine project. Start by reading your chosen recipe carefully and write down all the ingredients you need. Divide the ingredient list by shopping destination. For example, if your recipe calls for pig trotters and booze (as it would if you’re using Jane Grigson’s recipe), that probably means a trip to the butcher shop and the liquor store.
Once you’ve got the ingredients, organize them on the counter and fridge in the order you’ll need them. Since it’s always recommended to keep forcemeat stuffing cold, cold, cold, leave those ingredients in the fridge until you need them.
Step 3 for making galantine: Gather your tools
Now that you’ve got your ingredients on deck, pull out all the tools you need to make your recipe. [By the way, you can switch the order of step 2 and step 3 if that suits you better.]
Here are the tools you’ll definitely need:
- A couple sharp knives.
- Cutting board.
- Bowls.
- Utensils.
- A pot to simmer the galantine in—a stew pot will do but if you have a fish poaching pot, that’s the perfect shape for this project!
- Cheesecloth.
- Butcher’s twine.
- Serving platter.
- Mason jar to another container to store leftover stock.
Here are the tools you might need:
- Food processor, if you’re making a seafood galantine, for example.
- Meat grinder, if you want to create your forcemeat the purist’s way.
- Gravy separator to facilitate separating the fat from your stock.
When you get your equipment ready before you start, it reduces chaos in the kitchen. You might not need to do this forever but it’s definitely helpful when you’re learning new recipes. Especially if you don’t have a sense of timing from the recipe. A galantine doesn’t have time-sensitive activities like trying to make fried eggs for more than one person (my worst nightmare, ha ha) but it’s still good to know your tools are right there when you need them.
Step 4 for making galantine: Debone the chicken (or make friends with your butcher)
If you’re going with the option of making friends with your butcher, move this step to the day before you go to the butcher. Call your butcher ahead of time to request the deboned chicken. This is also a good time to ask your butcher what kind of notice s/he prefers for such a special request. I wouldn’t walk in and ask anyone to debone a chicken on the spot. Of course, it could be your butcher has a bunch of folks on staff who can quickly debone a chicken like Jacques Pépin (more on that shortly). If you’re making friends with your butcher, know how to work within the preferred processes of the butcher shop instead of being a diva.
But, if you want the challenge for yourself, here are some resources to get you started. [Full confession, at the time of writing this, I’ve never taken on this challenge as I’m a scaredy cat who’s not sure if there’s ever been a sharp knife in my house. One day soon, I’ll take this on myself!]
How do you debone a chicken for a galantina?
Step 1: Relax the chicken using Martin Yan’s ancient Chinese secret.
After he relaxes the chicken, he cuts it up into 8 pieces (I think) and calls this deboning. But this doesn’t leave the skin intact so we must go onto a second tutorial. This step might not be strictly necessary, but relaxing the chicken also relaxes us. And I think that’s important when we’re learning a new skill.
Martin Yan’s tutorial for relaxing a whole chicken
Step 2: Watch Jacques Pépin’s ten-minute tutorial on how to debone a chicken for galantine.
You might think I’m cheating this article by not writing out the instructions for deboning a chicken. The instructions are already done perfectly on screen by legendary chef, Jacques Pépin, and the visuals are essential for understanding the process.
Jacques says that it should take you a minute to debone a chicken. This is probably after much practice. The video is 10 minutes long but budget more time for this step until you’re an old pro.
[On a side note, when I wrote my article, What is Galantine? Fancy Tubed Meat in Chicken Skin!, I watched another one of Jacques’ deboning videos and was extremely daunted. However, the 10-minute video I’m including below is so gentle that it makes me think the deboning a chicken challenge is possible for me!]
Jacques Pépin’s tutorial on deboning a chicken
Step 5 for making galantine: Patch up your chicken skin, as necessary
Now that you’ve deboned the chicken like a darn hero, wipe the sweat from your brow and have a cool sip of club soda to celebrate. You did it!
At the end of deboning the chicken for a galantine, you’re left with the skin and a layer of meat on top of it. If you’ve accidentally cut some of the skin or there are some bare spots, patch those areas up. You can use the chicken tenders (as Jacques does) or trim off some of the breast or leg meat.
Just lay the meat over the punctured or bare parts, no need to worry about securing it. Depending on the complexities of your recipe, you might want to set this flat chicken on a plate and put it in the fridge to keep cool. After all, you still need to make the stock and perhaps several layers of stuffing.
[Side note: If you read the galantine instructions in Garde Manger: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen, Fourth Edition by The Culinary Institute of America, you’ll see their method varies from Jacques’ method. The Garde Manger doesn’t leave any meat attached to the skin; instead they use just the skin to wrap up the forcemeat. This is also the method used in Wayne Gisslen’s book called Professional Cooking, College Version, Seventh Edition. This method seems to be the more “cheffy” method.]
Step 6 for making galantine: Put the stock on
Since the stock must cook for hours, you’d think this step would start earlier in the process…except you need that chicken carcass to go into the pot.
About the stock, Jane Grigson, in her book, Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, says, “Put the carcase on to boil in a large pan, together with a calf’s foot or pig’s trotters, a ham bone if you have one, an onion stuck with four cloves, a carrot, bouquet garni, and a mixture of wine and stock. Any other scraps of pork skin, or pork, veal or poultry bones, would not come amiss. You need as good a stock as you can make.”
Jane also recommends letting the stock simmer for two hours before you place your stuffed bird in it (which will simmer for another two hours).
Step 7 for making galantine: Prepare the salpicon or garnish, if using
A salpicon is “a mixture of chopped fish, meat, or vegetables in a sauce, used as fillings for croquettes, pastries, etc.” [Source: Dictionary.com]
In the context of forcemeat, a garnish—also called interior garnish—is “the term we use to describe any item that is mixed into the ground meat—nuts, whole chunks of meat, herbs—to provide visual contrast to the ground meat, a tantalizing mosaic, in addition to flavor.” [Source: Pâté, Confit, Rillette: Recipes from the Craft of Charcuterie, by Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman, an excellent book!]
Again, follow your recipe for the details but just know that you can go beyond only using forcemeat for the stuffing.
Step 8 for making galantine: Prepare the forcemeat stuffing
Now you can make your forcemeat the easy way or the hard way. The easy way includes using ground meat, even taking the sausages out of stuffing. Jane Grigson doesn’t recommend store-bought sausage meat because it’s too stodgy. But better to use pre-ground meat and make the galantine than letting a lack of a meat grinder dissuade you from making your recipe.
The hard way is preparing your own fat and lean meat mixture with your cold meat grinding equipment. Some forcemeat recipes call for multiple grinds with different size plates.
Again, follow your recipe as best as you can with what you’ve got.
Step 9 for making galantine: Decide on a layered or mixed approach for the salpicon
Jane Grigson, in her book mentioned earlier (which was published in 1967 by the way), says you can either add the salpicon to the forcemeat, like you would do with the garnish, or you can add it as separate layers between forcemeat layers.
I didn’t get the impression there’s a right and wrong method; I believe the differences are about labour and aesthetics. Mixing it all together is easier, but it might not look as nice. Making two or more layers takes more time (but not too much more) and might look more interesting when you slice the final product. Up to you!
Step 10 for making galantine: Add the meats to your deboned chicken and roll it up
Now take your deboned chicken out of the fridge and add your forcemeat and salpicon (if using) on top of it. Take the left side of the flattened chicken and fold the outer edge into the middle of the whole flattened chicken. Then take the right side of the flattened chicken and fold it over until the edge is beyond the middle (where you folded the other side). In case these words aren’t clear, watch the Jacques Pépin video again to see this. Then tuck in any loose bits and cover them with excess skin.
Four options for securing the seam:
- Knotting – In Jacques’ video, he wraps the galantine with twine from end to end—using a knot called the half-hitch. We don’t see the cooking method so it’s unclear whether this product will be wrapped with cheesecloth next.
- Sewing – Jane Grigson suggests sewing the seam though she does not say with what. Twine, I imagine.
- Crimping – The Garde Manger says, “The skin should just overlap itself by about ½ inch/1 cm, forming a seam…Secure the galantine or roulade by crimping each end and smoothing the forcemeat away from the ends.” They then tie off the ends with twine (but remember, this is the chicken skin only version, so the ends are thin, unlike what we see with Jacques’ demonstration).
- Trussing – Peter Hertzmann (in the article I referenced above) says, “Gather the ends of the chicken skin that were originally along the back of the carcass and carefully fold the package until a cylinder. Using a long metal skewer, truss the loose ends of the cut skin together to snugly encompass the forcemeat. Using a skewer to hold the loose ends of skin together is my addition to the recipe technique. Most recipes provide no instructions as to how to hold the ends of skin together during the rolling and forming process.”
Step 11 for making galantine: Wrap the galantine in cheesecloth and secure
Now wrap the galantine snugly in cheesecloth and secure the ends with twine. Recipes definitely vary at this step as you’ll see in the examples below.
Peter Hertzmann suggests using moistened cheesecloth and wrapping strips of muslin over the cheesecloth to keep the seam sealed during poaching.
The Garde Manger advises using a few strips of cheesecloth over the middle part of the galantine only.
Wayne Gisslen suggests rolling the galantine in cheesecloth and parchment paper to achieve the smoothest roll possible.
I’d want to choose a wrapping method that had reinforcement, like the muslin strips, so my galantine didn’t unravel into soup. I’m guessing you could also use the butcher twine outside the cheesecloth for added security (but not too tight as you don’t want unseemly indentations in your final product).
Step 12 for making galantine: Simmer the galantine for hours
Now that you’ve dealt with the security of the galantine, this next step is a breeze. Once your stock has simmered for two hours, gently put the wrapped galantine in the pot. Jane Grigson doesn’t say whether to remove the pig’s trotters (etc.) from the stock pot before adding the galantine so I suppose you don’t unless there’s not enough room to contain it all.
Simmer the galantine for about two hours (again, follow your recipe, these are just guidelines). Don’t let your simmer become a boil. Most of the recipes I’ve looked at do this poaching on the stove and that’s fine. But it can be easier to keep a gentle simmer in the oven than on the stove so keep that in mind as an option.
Your recipe may tell you how long to cook the galantine and/or the internal temperature to aim for.
It’s important not to overcook the galantine, either for too long or with an aggressive boil. Overcooking the galantine causes the fat to leak out and leave dry chicken behind. So sad!
Step 13 for making galantine: Rest the galantine in the broth and rewrap when cool
Once it’s cooked, let the galantine rest in the broth for 15 minutes to an hour, until it’s cool enough for you to handle it. Your galantine will shrink during cooking, so it needs to be unwrapped and rewrapped in cheesecloth.
Peter suggests further wrapping it with a sushi mat or flexible cutting board and tying it up.
Jane’s method is different. She suggests squeezing a bunch of liquid out of the galantine (in its current wrap) but not too much or else it won’t be succulent.
Neither of them suggest weighing down the galantine as you might with a pâté en terrine.
Step 14 for making galantine: Set the galantine aside overnight
Well, this is easy. Put your galantine in the fridge overnight and forget about it while you clean up the kitchen.
At this point, you still have the stock on the stove. You can go to step 15 now or wait until the next day, depending on what works best with your schedule.
Step 15 for making galantine: Make a jelly with the simmering liquid
With that chicken carcass, the pig trotters and who-knows-what-else you threw into your pot, your stock, when cooled, should be gelatinous. (If it’s not, you’ll need to add some gelatin.) This jelly—in cooking terms—is also called an aspic.
This step is about turning the liquid into jelly and removing the fat. Depending on the tools you use, you can do this in one or two steps.
The two-step method is straining all the solids out of your stock and pouring it into a tall jar. A tall jar lets you skim off a smaller area of fat (but takes longer to cool). After it’s cooled and the fat removed, you’d warm up the jelly and pour it into a baking dish so it’s about a centimetre thick, which is about half an inch. This is the basis of the jelly cubes you’ll make in step 18.
The one-step method is using one of those gravy-separating measuring cups that lets you pour out the strained liquid and leave the fat in the measuring cup. If this gizmo works properly, you can pour the liquid into a baking dish so it’s about a centimetre thick.
But if your stock turned cloudy during cooking, you’ll have to clarify it before you pour it into the baking dish. The reason for clarifying is so your jelly cubes are clear instead of opaque—clarified stock just looks nicer than cloudy stock (and jelly).
Clarifying stock sounds like a pain but it’s quite easy, especially if you follow the instructions in the video below (which I should’ve done the first time I clarified stock).
Clarifying stock with an egg raft by Danish cook, Max M Rasmussen
You’ll have more stock than you need for the jelly squares but before you store the rest in the fridge for another use, use some of it for step 16. This instruction stands if it’s now day two. If it’s still day one, put all the leftover stock and jelly dish in the fridge for tomorrow.
Step 16 for making galantine: Brush the cold galantine with some warmed jelly
Now it’s day two and your galantine is well-rested from spending the night in the fridge. Take it out of the fridge and glaze it with some warmed jelly. You can use a pastry brush—or a paint brush that’s clearly labelled for food only—to do this. Put the galantine back in the fridge until that layer of aspic has gelled. Then do this all again for a second layer.
This aspic makes the galantine shiny looking, adding to the wow factor.
Step 17 for making galantine: Decorate the galantine, if desired, and secure with more jelly
Here’s where you can get fancy and decorate the galantine with elements such as thin vegetable slices shaped like flowers, herbs, etc. To see how impressive this can get, look at Peter Hertzmann’s Galantine de Poularde recipe. His self-described obsessiveness pays off in the looks department, that’s for sure. What a beautiful galantine!
If you’re like me and not at all artsy, it’s okay to skip this step. Jane Grigson thinks so too. In her book, Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, she says, “Everyone has their own ideas on decoration. But I would recommend the abstract and simple – tomato flowers and cucumber leaves raise suspicions that the cook has got something to hide.”
Well, phew.
Step 18 for making galantine: Chop the set jelly into squares
Once the jelly is set, chop the jelly into squares. Since your aspic is already about a centimetre thick, cut the squares into centimetres too. Which, again, is about half an inch.
Step 19 for making galantine: Arrange the galantine and jelly squares and serve
Put your galantine on your favourite platter and spread the jelly squares all around it so it looks nice. Take a couple pictures so you’ll be ready if anyone ever asks to see your galantine, ha ha.
If your galantine will be on display for a while before serving, keep it chilled. You can cover a large thin ice pack with a few layers of tea towels and put the platter on top of it. Don’t put the platter directly on the ice pack as it may freeze your galantine.
Cut the galantine into thin slices and place each slice on a serving plate with some of the jelly squares, a dollop of mustard and/or jam and a gherkin or whatever you want. Use a charcuterie board as inspiration for the side elements. Don’t get too fancy with the accoutrements as you want your galantine to be the star of the show.
Take a couple more pictures of the sliced galantine before it gets devoured.
Step 20 for making galantine: Enjoy your accomplishment!
As you taste your galantine—which I’m sure is delicious—savour this moment. You made a difficult forcemeat dish and now you (and maybe your friends) are enjoying the fruits of your labour. Good job! Now, go get another slice while you can!
Conclusion
A galantine can seem like a daunting project but if you break it into simple steps, it seems much more doable. And once the deboning is sorted—it only takes a minute, ha ha—the rest of the steps are well within your reach and mine! May your galantines always be glorious and tasty!
