hello this is chef john from food wishes comm with pink eye chicken that's right
i believe this is the first recipe we're ever doing from laos although depending
on who you talk to this recipe actually might be Canadian
okay I'm not exactly sure but what I am sure about is that pink eye translates
to grilled chicken which means the name of this recipe is actually grilled
chicken chicken which sounds kind of funny but actually is very appropriate
since this stuff is at least twice as good as your average grilled chicken
recipe so with that let's go ahead and get started
started by grinding up some whole black peppercorns which I'm gonna do by hand
so I can get the exact coarseness I want and also sneak in a little bit of cardio
work but whether you do this by hand or use a grinder or a spice mill we're
gonna want to freshly grind this right before we use it and also we do want to
leave a kind of course and when I always finish grinding mine it looked a little
something like this and once that set we can move on to the
second major flavor component which would be a huge amount of freshly
chopped cilantro and if you're one of these people that's good at noticing
things you'll see that we did not remove the stems or as far as cilantro goes the
stems and leaves taste pretty much the same and for a marinade like this we can
just go ahead chop everything up together oh by the way if your crew does
not like cilantro and will mutiny if you use it you can if you want use some
other herbs I mean you are after all the captain
bligh of this ping guy and in the blog post I will tell you what other herbs to
use instead but anyway we'll go ahead and chop that up fairly small at which
point we can move on to the part of the recipe where we throw everything in a
bowl including what most non Americans would call our chopped coriander and
then we'll also toss in our freshly ground black pepper and some oyster
sauce which is basically sort of an extra thick extra savory sort of Swedish
soy sauce the yes does actually have some moisture in it we're also gonna add
some soy sauce as well as some Asian fish sauce which if you want to be a
real food wisher is a mandatory ingredient in your pantry and then we
will finish up with a little bit of vegetable oil as
a few shakes of cayenne and that's it we will stir this together and our kind of
unusual looking but very effective marinade is done and ready to flavor
about two to three pounds of boneless skinless chicken thighs so we'll go
ahead and add those in and then using our bare hands we will massage this
until we're sure those pieces are very very well coated okay when it comes to
chicken thighs not only do we have to worry about the nooks and crannies but
we also have lots of cracks and crevices so I really want you to get in there and
get in there deep and work this until we have complete and absolute coverage at
which point we'll stop and clean off our hands as well as around the top of the
bowl and then what we'll do is go ahead and wrap this up and let it marinate in
the fridge for anywhere between four and 12 hours okay in a pinch you could
probably do it for a little less time but if you can try to give it at least
four hours but either way we'll go ahead pop that in the fridge into a Raider
grille speaking of which at some point before
we do head to the grill we're gonna want to make our dipping sauce which for me
is going to include some seasoned rice vinegar as well as some freshly squeezed
lime juice and we'll also put in a very generous amount of crushed garlic and a
nice big spoon of sambal chili sauce or really any kind of hot sauce or you
could even do some minced fresh chilies we will also splash in a little bit of
fish sauce as well as some freshly chopped cilantro and then since this is
supposed to be a rather sweet sauce I'm gonna go ahead and add a good amount of
honey which by the way is not typical all right what they usually serve with
this chicken is a sugar syrup that's flavored with these other ingredients
and I'm not talking about a little bit of sugar I'm talking about like a half a
cup for this size batch so while this is gonna be a fairly sweet sauce it is
nowhere close to the original but I think very delicious nonetheless and
that's it as soon as we mix that up we'll simply keep that refrigerated
until our chickens grilled which is exactly what we're gonna do next
so we'll go ahead and pull our chicken out of the fridge and unwrap it and grab
some tongs and that's it believe it or not this is ready to go straight onto
the grill and ideally those grill grates are sitting over some beautiful hot red
glowing coals and we will go ahead and place our chicken on and I generally
like to lay the flatter side down first but it probably doesn't matter that much
either way and what we'll do is grill these for about five to six minutes per
side or until just cook through all right boneless skinless chicken
thighs cooks a lot faster than people think I mean pretty much about the same
amount of time as a chicken breast all right just because this is dark meat
does not mean it has to cook a lot longer so I gave that first side about
five minutes and then flip them over and then let me give you one little bit
of a heads-up here whenever we grill something that came straight from a wet
marinade it can tend to sometimes stick a little bit okay so with some of these
you might have to give the underside a little scrape with the tongs to make
sure they're released before you try to flip it over but having said that I
didn't have much of an issue and I went ahead and flip those over and gave the
other side about five minutes and of course use a thermometer to check if you
want but once they go from feeling mushy to sort of firm and springing back to
the touch are usually done which mine were so I went ahead and pulled those
off the grill onto a plate and I really lucked out here since somehow all the
best looking pieces ended up on the top I mean what are the odds but no matter
how you pile these up you're gonna be looking at a very impressive plate of
grilled chicken and while I will plate up a couple of these in a minute and
serve it with our dipping sauce I just could not resist going straight in for a
taste which really was incredible very slightly smoky slightly sweet very
savory and a little bit funky with the heat from our black pepper punchy
through nicely that my friends is just some incredible tasting grilled chicken
and that's without our sweet and garlicky dipping sauce which really does
elevate this even further so I plated some up next to a cucumber salad and
proceeded to start slicing and dipping and because of those smoky salty savory
peppery elements I just described this simple sweet garlicky sauce is just
absolutely perfect and other than wishing I had a little bit of rice under
this I don't think I could have enjoyed this anymore
but anyway that's it's my take on pinkeye chicken a dish so nice they
named part of it twice and as far as I know this is the first low Asian recipe
ever do appear on food wishes unless like I said earlier it's actually
Canadian Bob regardless you cannot have enough interesting easy and delicious
grilled chicken recipes in the repertoire which is why I really do hope
you give this a try soon so head over to food wishes dot-com for all the
ingredient amounts of moral faux as usual and as always
you