Instant Pot Chicken With 40 Cloves of Garlic. The classic Provencal farmhouse recipe, sped up in a pressure cooker. It's simple if you have pre-peeled garlic at your local grocery store, and worth the effort even if you have to peel all 40 cloves by hand.
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I love chicken thighs. (Bring on the dark side...of the chicken!) I love garlic. I love French farmhouse cooking. I love my Instant Pot. This recipe is a love-fest of all these things at once. I know 40 cloves of garlic sounds crazy, but try it before you pass judgement. I make it often, and it's in my regular recipe rotation for a reason.
Ingredient Notes
Chicken Thighs
Use bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs in this recipe. Dark meat chicken stands up to the pressure cooker better than white meat, and thighs give me a much higher meat-to-bone ratio than drumsticks. That said, if all you have is chicken breasts (bone-in, skin-on please), the cooking time is the same; if you use drumsticks, cut the pressure cooking time back to 20 minutes at high pressure.
Boneless Skinless Chicken Thighs
I prefer bone-in chicken for this recipe, but you can use boneless skinless chicken thighs. Brown the boneless skinless chicken thighs on one side (instead of the skin side of the thighs in the recipe), and cut the pressure cooking time back to 15 minutes at high pressure.
Frozen Chicken Thighs?
This recipe won't work as well with frozen chicken thighs, but you can use them if you have to. (The thighs have to be individually frozen - a big block of frozen thighs just won't work.) Skip the brown the chicken thighs step and move on to lightly toasting the garlic in the tablespoon of olive oil. Increase the pressure cooking time to 35 minutes to cook the frozen thighs.
Thickening
I stir in a flour slurry to thicken the sauce at the end. Pressure cooking results in a thin sauce, because there is no evaporation to thicken up the liquid. For this recipe I prefer a flour slurry, but you can also do a corn starch slurry if you want to skip the extra simmering. Whisk 2 tablespoons of corn starch and ¼ cup of cold water, and whisk the slurry into the pot liquid. Serve the pot liquid immediately - no extra simmering needed.
Wine substitutions
Almost any white wine will work in this recipe; I stay away from very sweet wines, but anything else will work. Pinot Grigio and Sauvignon Blanc are two I often reach for - look for dry and cheap. (I will buy a small box wine if I only need it for this recipe - they're cheap and more than good enough for cooking.)
Note that simmering the wine will boil off some of the alcohol, but not all of it. If you are strict about not having alcohol, replace the wine with more chicken stock and skip the "bring the wine to a simmer" step.
Garlic
Garlic is so important to this recipe that I gave it its own section:
Garlic Notes
Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic is easily translated to pressure cooking…but, oh, the garlic peeling. Most 40 cloves recipes start with the instructions "peel the cloves from 3 heads of garlic". That's a lot of peeling. Sure, I can do it, but there are two good shortcuts:
Pre-peeled garlic
Pre-peeled garlic is here to make this an easy recipe. Check the refrigerator case in your grocery store - you don't want garlic in oil; you want whole, peeled cloves. Also - make sure the container looks dry, and there are no yellowing cloves. Pre-peeled garlic is easy, but it doesn't last - it's only good for a few days after it's peeled.
Shake unpeeled cloves between two metal bowls
I've tried the "shake the garlic between two metal bowls" trick, and while it does help, it doesn't work as well for me as it does in online videos, where they get all the cloves peeled with 20 seconds of shaking. I still wind up having to peel a bunch of the cloves by hand - but it does speed up the process.
40 cloves, 41 cloves, whatever it takes
I don't actually count out 40 cloves of garlic when I buy pre-peeled cloves. I buy a 6-ounce package of pre-peeled garlic and call it close enough. If all your store carries is a 4-ounce package, that's good enough - you don't need exactly 40 cloves for this recipe to work. A little more or less will be fine.
Garlic in oil
Please don't. Garlic cloves in jars of oil don't have anywhere near the flavor of fresh cloves.
But…isn't that a lot of garlic?
Yes it is. And it's great! The garlic mellows and softens as it cooks, and the cloves delicious to eat with the chicken. (If you don't like the taste of garlic, you should probably skip this recipe. But if you don't like garlic, how did you get this far into a recipe with "40 cloves of garlic" in the title?)
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Instant Pot Chicken With 40 Cloves of Garlic Recipe
- Total Time: 1 hour 20 minutes
- Yield: 8 chicken thighs 1x
Description
Instant Pot Chicken With 40 Cloves of Garlic recipe. The classic farmhouse recipe from Provence, updated for a pressure cooker.
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 8 chicken thighs (about 3 pounds), bone-in and skin-on
- 2 teaspoons fine sea salt
- ½ teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
- 40 peeled cloves of garlic
- ½ cup white wine
- ½ cup chicken stock (preferably homemade chicken broth)
- 10 sprigs fresh thyme (or 2 teaspoons of dried thyme)
- 2 tablespoons flour (optional, to thicken sauce)
Instructions
- Brown the skin side of the chicken thighs: Heat the olive oil in an Instant Pot set to Sauté mode - High until the oil is shimmering (Use medium-high heat in a stovetop pressure cooker). While the oil heats, sprinkle the chicken thighs with the salt and pepper. Sear the thighs in 2 batches: put 4 thighs in the pot, skin side down, and sear until the skin is golden brown, about 5 minutes. Move the browned chicken thighs to a bowl, then sear the second batch of thighs, about 5 more minutes, then move them to the bowl. The thighs will render a lot of fat - pour out all but 1 tablespoon of fat from the pot before moving on to the next step.
- Lightly toast the garlic, then deglaze the pot with wine: Add the garlic cloves in a single layer into the pot and cook until they are just starting to turn golden brown, about 2 minutes. (Don't overcook the garlic - burnt garlic tastes bitter.) Pour in the wine and bring to a simmer. Simmer for 1 minute to boil off some of the alcohol, then scrape the bottom of the pot with a flat-edged wooden spoon to loosen any browned bits of chicken stuck to the pot.
- Pressure cook for 25 minutes with a natural pressure release: Pour in the chicken stock, then add the browned chicken thighs and any juices left in the bowl. Try to submerge the thighs as best you can in the liquid in the pot. Sprinkle the thyme sprigs over the top of the chicken, then lock the lid. Pressure cook on **high pressure for 25 minutes** in an Instant Pot or other electric pressure cooker, or for 20 minutes in a stovetop PC. (Use Manual, Pressure Cook, or Pressure Cook-Custom mode set to 25 minutes in an Instant Pot.) Let the pressure come down naturally, about 20 minutes more.
- Thicken the sauce (optional) and serve: Scoop the chicken thighs and garlic cloves to a platter with a slotted spoon. Discard the thyme stems (the leaves will have fallen off into the sauce, leave them in the pot.) Put 2 tablespoons of flour in a small bowl and whisk in ½ cup of the cooking liquid from the pot to make a flour slurry. Whisk the flour slurry back into the pot, set the pot back to medium-high heat (sauté mode in my IP), bring to a simmer, and simmer for 1 minute. Taste the sauce for seasoning - it should be highly seasoned, and may need some more salt and pepper. Ladle some sauce over the chicken and garlic, and pass the rest of the sauce at the table. Enjoy!
- Prep Time: 10 min
- Cook Time: 1 hour 10 minutes
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Nutrition
- Serving Size: 1 thigh plus sauce and garlic
- Calories: 489
- Sugar: 0.4 g
- Sodium: 490.4 mg
- Fat: 34.1 g
- Carbohydrates: 7.9 g
- Fiber: 0.4 g
- Protein: 33.5 g
- Cholesterol: 189.6 mg
What to serve with Instant Pot Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic
I serve this with mashed potatoes or roasted baby potatoes, so I can use the pot liquid as a gravy. I also love to serve it with bread (a French baguette cut into slices is traditional), so I can scoop up a few of the soft garlic cloves and mash them onto the bread slices.
Scaling
This recipe scales up and down easily, except for the liquid. You need a cup of liquid to bring the Instant Pot up to pressure, so leave the ½ cup of wine and ½ cup of chicken broth, and scale all the other ingredients up or down. You can (just barely) double this recipe in a 6 quart pressure cooker, though it fits better in an 8 quart pressure cooker. If you want to fit it in a 3 or 4 quart pressure cooker, cut the ingredients in half (except for the liquids, like I said a few sentences ago).
Make ahead and Leftovers
This recipe is fine made ahead a day or two - it reheats well. I save leftovers in 2-cup containers, with a couple chicken thighs, garlic, and sauce; covered containers will last in the refrigerator for a few days, or in the freezer for up to six months.
What do you think?
Questions? Other ideas? Leave them in the comments section below.
Related Posts
If you're looking for some other Instant Pot Chicken, try my Pressure Cooker Chicken Stew, Pressure Cooker Teriyaki Chicken Drumsticks, or Instant Pot Chicken Cacciatore. Other great chicken recipes include my Air Fryer Breaded Chicken Thighs and Potatoes, Sear Roasted Chicken Breasts with Shallot Herb Pan Sauce, and Grilled BBQ Chicken Thighs
Or check out my Instant Pot (Pressure Cooker) Recipes Index
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