You’ve maybe heard of steak au poivre, a traditional dish with peppercorn-crusted steak and a creamy pan sauce. Well, the most recent trending dinner recipe on TikTok presents a new take on the French classic — chicken au poivre — and everyone is making it.
Chicken au poivre, which translates from French to “pepper chicken,” is pretty much the same as the classic steak au poivre, just with a more accessible protein.
Everyone makes this recipe a little differently, but the basic components and steps still remain the same. There’s no single serving here: most videos begin with partially breaking down a whole chicken by cutting it down the middle and laying it down flat, butterfly-style.
After breaking down and simply seasoning the whole broken-down chicken, you start on your sauce.
One chicken au poivre recipe that blew up on TikTok was posted by @daeatzwitbri, who has over 125K followers on TikTok, on August 27. For the base of her sauce, she adds peppercorn, rosemary, diced shallots, minced garlic, and the secret non-traditional ingredient: a cube of chicken bouillon. She mixes in a whole carton of heavy whipping cream, then pours into a dish with the partially cooked chicken before popping it back into the oven, adding sherry wine and occasionally pulling the chicken out to baste it in the sauce.
The result? Hear it from the creator herself: “This thing was falling apart. Juicy, flavorful. I mean, it was so much flavor. The sauce was absolutely good,” she said in her video. For a side, the creator went with mashed potatoes, roasted broccolini, and topped the whole dish with even more creamy sauce.
The very first recipe for chicken au poivre comes from popular creator Corre Larkin, who has over 680K followers on TikTok (@cocolarkincooks). She first posted the recipe in February, but it was when she reposted the original video this month that her recipe began to go viral. While she doesn’t add chicken bouillon into her sauce, Larkin does crush her own peppercorns by hand for a better texture.
“I don’t have words for how good that is,” Larkin said in her video after trying the finished product. “It’s peppery, but not too peppery. And that is truly the most juicy, moist chicken I think I’ve ever made…I think it’s the best chicken I’ve ever made.”
Larkin followed up her chicken au poivre video with a twist: chicken au poivre…without the chicken. After seeing so many people recreate her recipe, she created a cauliflower au poivre recipe for her vegetarian followers, along with anybody looking to up their fiber intake.
“This is possibly the best roast vegetable I’ve ever made in my entire life,” she said near the start of her video — and it looks to be that way.
To start, she roasts a whole cauliflower head in the oven with olive oil for about 20 minutes, wrapping it with parchment paper and aluminum foil. Then, she makes a similar sauce to her chicken au poivre recipe’s, only adding two majorly different ingredients: brandy and Better than Bouillon mushroom base. Then, she pours the sauce over the partially-cooked cauliflower, treating the rest of the cooking process as she did the chicken by basting it frequently.
“The cauliflower is so soft, but still maintains its shape,” she said. “This was absolute heaven.”
Using either chicken or cauliflower will still provide a more affordable yet equally delicious spin on the classic steak au poivre. Make sure to try this dinner recipe for yourself, because it looks absolutely delicious.