Pig Honey Chicken

An interesting thing happened on the way to making Pig Honey BBQ Sauce a reality, the formula was tasted and found to have an incredible balance of flavors and aromas, well beyond just being a way to make ribs shiny.  I immediately thought of street vendor style chicken, grilled or roasted, to really set off the flavors even more.  So I marinated the chicken with every intention of later grinding or chunking them and making them into yakitori over the kettle.   But, deadlines and such being what they are, I ended up simply grilling them.

As you can see, this worked out great.  Anyone who has followed my cooking understands that for me, fusion in terms of food really means taking from one cuisine and adding to another, not just in terms of moving one ethnic flavor to another, but, in the freedom to use a variety of technqiues, such as haute cuisine applied to BBQ.  In this case, it was street food made indoors on a pan.

The chicken was marinated in Pig Honey Sauce, which, if you remember was to be a ribs specific sauce, for 48 hours.  It was then boned and grilled on a very hot grill plate on the stove.  This was to take just a few minutes on each side on a searing hot hunk of metal.  The results above speak for themselves. In the image below, you can see whole thighs and skinless breasts.  The breasts ended up as torikatsu.

Once grilled, these were served with steamed Japanese rice as a simple plate.  The beauty of using the grill pan was not only the nice marks, but, the chicken fat was allowed to drain away. I have found that a reversible skillet is an invaluable tool in the kitchen, it not only allows for chicken like this, but, when flipped to it's smooth size, I can use it as a low heat option for heating and warming sauces, toasting bread and distributing heat, essentially giving me three burners where my stove has only two. Back to the chicken, plated and whole, just another grilled thigh.

But, once plated and sliced, you can see that there was an amazing amount of moisture and the texture of the chicken was perfect.  The flavor was intense and very complex.

 I have no doubt that when I do get it made into yakitori, it will be a very tender, juicy stick of meat. In truth, there was no sauce needed once the cooking started, as the marination process insured a lot of moisture in the meat. One recipe of the Pig Honey was plenty for this, I would have even had enough for a spray bottle to mist the chicken on the grill. Here is that recipe again.

Pig Honey Sauce
1 cup apple juice
1/4 cup Red Boat Fish Sauce
1/4 cup Braggs Amino Acids
1/8 cup Honey
1 Tablespoon turbinado sugar

Combine all ingredients and bring to just short of a boil, maintain heat until sugar is dissolved.

Here is the sauce in the dribble bottle, a spray bottle would have been better, but, I don't own one of those yet.