Roast Chicken Breast with White Bean Puree and Asparagus

This chicken dinner recipe encapsulates the way I love to cook. Three simple recipes, a perfectly roast chicken breast, a silky white bean puree flavoured with garlic and blanched then seared asparagus in an orange butter sauce. The combination of elements is just as important when creating a meal as the preparation and cooking of the ingredients!

The Perfectly Roast Chicken Breast.

So let’s break down this recipe…

The centrepiece of this chicken dinner is the perfectly roast chicken breast. Roasting a chicken breast is super simple and if done well should be succulent and full of light chicken flavour.

As with all cooking there are a million ways to end up in the same place.

Here I rub the chicken lightly with oil, season well, and then fry in a dry pan to crisp up the skin. All that is left to do then is transfer to the oven to cook for 20 minutes.

You could also do the ‘butter’ thang which is really good, I use it for the chicken breast I serve with my petits pois a la Francaise.

The White Bean Puree.

The white bean puree is the bedrock of this meal and it is the ‘glue’ that holds it all together.

It is a simple case of infusing the beans with a little garlic and bay, then blending to form a puree. Seriously it is that simple!

I always pass my purees through a fine sieve, it takes just a couple of minutes. But it really is the secret to a perfect silky puree.

As for the choice of beans, choose whatever variety of white bean is convenient. Likewise with the preparation, use canned or dried and then cooked, it makes no difference to this recipe.

For the record I use cannellini beans, aka white kidney beans. They are the same bean I use in my fagioli all’uccelletto recipe (Italian baked beans), but you could use navy beans or great northern beans.

The Asparagus with Orange…

Oh Look, asparagus, what a surprise to see this ingredient in a recipe here at this time of year!

Asparagus is unashamedly my favourite seasonal vegetable and it appears here a lot at this time of year.

This recipe treats it very simply, it is simply blanched in boiling salted water. Then it is thrown into the pan and seared in the chicken juices. Finally it is finished with butter, and fresh orange.

That’s it just a few minutes and it is done!

You can alternatively cook the air fryer asparagus and swap out the lemon juice for the orange that we use here.

Most importantly the flavours just work, orange chicken is typically associated with Westernised Chinese recipes but it works really well all ways round. 

And the white bean puree just sits there providing the earthy backdrop holding together the flavours!

So there you go, dinner, done!