Paprika chicken stew

My mom's goto dish. The amount of cream used is something I still dream about. No way I could eat it that way any more, and my mom also mended her ways and reduced the amount of fatty goodness. One does need to use some good full-fat sour cream though to balance the flavors.

This is best eaten with bread dumplings, nothing, I mean absolutely nothing beats the combination.
Other options are crusty bread, mashed potatoes, spaetzle, pasta, even rice.

Just the chicken!

This is a great way to prepare chicken to be used with other dishes. Even the much lighter version of the paprika sauce is pretty heavy, so you may not want to always make it. Simply let the chicken cool, and then pull the meat off the bones in nice chunks. Here is how one can use it with spinach sauce and mashed potatoes.

Chicken drumsticks that I like to use in this recipe have a wonderful property that it is really hard to dry them out. When you remove the skin, the drumsticks become fairly lean as there are no pockets of fat that I always find in thighs. Chicken breasts are simply too lean for this preparation - lately I have only been making them sous vide to avoid drying them out.

Ingredients

• Chicken pieces - I like using drumsticks with skin removed. Quantity - you need to be able to have them in one layer in your pan.
• 1/2 onion, finely chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 2 TBS butter or oil. Coconut oil works very well.
• 1/3 cup paprika, or adjust as you wish
• 1 TBS ancho chili, optional
• 2 TBS tomato paste (approx)
• 1 TBS or more dry marjoram, optional
• low sodium chicken broth, enough to cover the chicken half way
• 1/3 to 1/2 cup full fat sour cream. Sorry, no-fat cream will yield a miserable result.
• 1-2 TBS of flour

Preparation

Select a wide preferably shallow pan for which you have a lid. In the pan, on a medium heat, saute onions until they become translucent. Then add garlic, and saute until you it starts to release fragrances. Add paprika, stir and cook for a minute of two. Make sure the heat is not too high so that the paprika does not burn. The flavor of paprika changes substantially to the better when you fry it for a bit.

Arrange chicken in one layer in the pan and season each piece with salt. Add enough chicken broth to cover the chicken half way up, or a bit more. Also add rubbed marjoram and tomato paste. Cover and simmer until the chicken is cooked, turning the chicken every 10 minutes or so. After about 30 minutes the chicken should be cooked.

Take the chicken pieces out and collect them in a bowl. Pour the braising liquid into a gravy separator and wait until the fat collects at the top. 

Carefully pour the liquid from the gravy separator in a fresh pan, leaving the fat behind. Add flour, about 1TBS per cup of liquid, or less if you want a runnier sauce. Add sour cream. Mix everything with an immersion blender - this is a sure way to avoid flour clumps, and also a sure way to get rid of any onion piece that was not caught by the gravy separator.

Alternatively, mix flour, sour cream, and some cold water to make a slurry.

Bring the liquid to a boil on a medium-high heat while whisking slowly and continuously, preferably with a flat whisk. Cook for a couple of minutes so that the gravy thickens. Return the chicken to the pan, heat it up and serve a piece of chicken on top of some gravy.