Hello to all my Hive friends and especially to the Foodies Bee Hive Community! Last weekend it was heritage day and we had ourselves a braai - the South African style barbeque that has its OWN heritage in itself!
In the process of getting the chicken ready, I often marinade it. This time I really outdid myself and it is something that I need to try to recreate. Luckily I took photos of my process so this should not be too difficult a feat to accomplish!
First things first, I have to be honest here. I did this all on pretty short notice. I basically had half-frozen chicken thighs to work with. The fire of the braai was already burning and when you deal with chicken, you need to be super clean and super careful.
While a beef steak is welcome being rare to medium rare which is basically raw and hot, chicken is a meat that needs to be cooked all the way through without any pink near the bones.
Despite working from frozen, I managed to make this absolutely delicious and it is something that I am eager to reproduce.
I am pretty sure that the ingredients I have used for this chicken will be easy for you to find pretty much anywhere!
Let's get into it!
Prepare the Chicken
So we start with raw and partially frozen chicken. I want to marinade it as well before cooking it over the coals once the fire burns down. How to do? Well, you need to get stabbing!
Using a two pronged carving fork I stabbed each piece of chicken through the skin and meat. This will ensure that the marinade will penetrate faster into the chicken!
I will also be putting this chicken in the oven at a very low heat. This will help with three things: Quicken the defrost, precook the chicken before I apply outside heat on the chicken over the coals and allow the marinade to get in and make its magic a lot faster!
Home-made Marinade! Zak-style!
Here we have MOST of the ingredients that I used. If you were going to do this yourself, you might need to improvise a little as products are ever so slightly different from place to place.
However, these are some REALLY ordinary ingredients that you will probably find everywhere. If you can't get the exact same one, then go for whatever that ingredient represents flavourwise.
First up we have some mixed herbs. This is dry and it is made up of a mix of parsely, mint, bay, thyme, etc etc. If you had fresh mixed herb you could shred it would be even better! #goals!
Next up is some traditional braai spice. So salt, coriander, mild chili flakes/pepper. Let "the ancestors guide you with amounts! Do what feels right!
Next up is crushed garlic. Here is another ad-lib item you will need to tailor depending on what is available and what is avialable. This was crushed garlic with ginger. If you just get crushed garlic then try that. If you can take fresh garlic and crush/slice it, cool too.
What is important here also is that with mine there is a lot of the juice at the bottom of the tub. I made sure to include some of the liquid as well as the garlic.
Here I put my garlic in.
Then a squirt of Sriracha sauce. Spicy stuff. In this combination, not at all. Add more heat as you wish...
I then added some Peach Chutney and started mixing. Again, depending on what chutney you can find... but I used peach this time.
I added even more Chutney! I let the ancestors guide me!
I wanted brown sugar but I used some white sugar instead and stirred it in well.
Time to combine!
Here I used a deep pyrex dish. That way the chicken can bunch together but there is still plenty of room for the marinade and the water from the chicken.
Stick a dollop of marinade on each piece and massage in.
The remainder of the marinade is just drizzled on and the stuck it into the oven at 120C heat while I wait for my coals to get ready.
Before the oven.
After the oven. If I was not going to braai them I would just have stuck it in the oven for longer and at a higher heat and it should come out quite well.
Time for the Fire!
And there we have it, awesome chicken pieces on the braai! The sauce in the pan was made up of my marinade and water from the chicken.
I then would baste the chicken with a brush as I went along. The outside of the chicken quickly burns to a blackened state, this is beacuse of the sugar and the peach chutney!
There you have it! Try it at home!
I will try create something new and interesting along these lines and I will see you then and post about it!
