Hunter's chicken — France

Hunter's chicken, also called chicken with hunter's sauce or sautéed hunter's chicken, is a chicken dish that belongs to French cuisine. Its defining elements are pieces of sautéed chicken combined with a reduced hunter's sauce, built from tomatoes, mushrooms, onions or shallots, white wine, brandy and tarragon. The dish is reported across French home cooking and restaurant menus, and versions of it appear well beyond France under similar names, though those dishes can differ substantially and often share little more than the use of chicken. To prepare it, chicken pieces are browned in butter and oil, then set aside while mushrooms, shallots and garlic are softened in the same pan. Brandy is added and reduced, followed by white wine, tomatoes and stock, and the chicken is returned to the pan to finish cooking as the sauce reduces to a coating consistency, finished with chopped tarragon. Cooks vary the balance of tomato to wine, the type of mushroom used, and whether cream is stirred in at the end, producing sauces that range from thin and winey to thick and tomato-forward. What is generally kept across versions is the combination of mushrooms, shallots, tarragon and a wine-and-brandy reduction that gives the dish its name.