The 102nd Thing To Do With Chicken

Much like everyone else, I have one hundred and one different ways to cook chicken. Fortunately for us, because said one hundred and one recipes were becoming a little stale, I found a new one in a little magazine dearest Chrissy signed me up for last year, as a treat when I was suffering through chemo.

I thought I'd post it, just in case you were looking for your one hundred and second way to cook chicken. And, as it's a grill recipe, the seasonal timing is perfect. (For those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway.)

Misted Ginger Chicken

Makes one chicken

Combine in a bowl:
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon fresh grated ginger
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon fresh minced thyme
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
Minced zest of one lemon

In a spray bottle, pour one bottle/can of ginger beer or really good ginger ale.

Spread the rub on the chicken bits (in the actual recipe, they call for a whole chicken, split on the backbone, with each breast, thigh, wing, and leg neatly folded into two, easily grilled bits, but as I had plenty of chicken in the freezer and none of it was in whole-form, I simply used the bits and bobs from a fryer.), making sure to spread the rub under the skin and on top of the skin.

Grilling the chicken is a bit of an adventure, because they call for you to use a technique called "indirect grilling" by which you place the chicken bits around the edge of the grill, and not directly on top of the flame. This takes longer, but the results, I guarantee you, are worth the extra time involved.

Place the chicken bits on the grill, away from the heat source, and don't move them for the entire cooking time. You don't need to flip them at all, as they will cook nicely without your efforts. All you need to do is, every ten or fifteen minutes, mist them with the spray bottle of ginger beer/ale to keep the skin moist, and to flavor it. The ginger ale/beer lightly carmelizes under the heat and provides a nice flavor and crispiness to the skin. And that's it. That's all you have to do.

It took about forty minutes or so to cook two thighs and three legs. If you cook the breasts, I would suspect it would take a bit longer, simply because most chickens nowadays have huge boobs. But the flavor of the ginger entirely transformed the chicken. To paraphrase the husband, most chicken dishes taste like, well, chicken, and don't transform into anything new. The ginger brought a entirely different flavor out of the chicken. He enjoyed it tremendously, particularly because I served it with the first of the sweet corn I could find, and a salad. It was a nice, light supper on a warm day.

Highly recommended.

Posted by Kathy at May 29, 2008 09:25 AM | TrackBack