Welcome, my name is Kevin Ives, I’m the executive chef at Merriman’s in Poipu at
the Kukuiula Shopping Center.
Today I’m going to be preparing a dish; the lemongrass scented natural chicken.
We’ll be preparing it on the grill with a coconut sweet potato puree, a little salad
of shaved raw carrots and coconuts with fresh lime and a fresh green curry chicken jus.
To start the dish we’ll begin with the chicken.
We have the breast and leg which has been boned out.
Once this has been brined and stuff with butter, we’ll season it with a little bit of salt,
cracked black pepper, we’ll put this over a medium flame on the grill, we really want
to bring out those caramelized flavors and crisp up that skin, so starting on a grill
we’ll be able to sear in those juices, and caramelizing that skin is important.
Second step is make the sweet potato puree.
The puree is a simple dish, it gives you the richness of a sweet potato puree without the
fat and butter and cream, we use coconut milk instead.
To begin, we’ll sweat these in olive oil.
You can use butter if you like, we like to keep the flavors lighter and cleaner.
My onions are beginning to sweat, starting to pop.
We want to stir them delicately.
We’ll add our sweet potato, we use a white sweet potato, they have a lot of texture to
them.
They’re nice and firm, but they still get that creamy sweet feel to them.
We’ll stir our potatoes and onions together.
At this point what I’ll do is add our coconut milk.
We’ve turned our chicken, it’s developed it’s caramelization; nice crisp flavors.
We’ve rendered a lot of that fat and the lemongrass is perfuming the flesh of this
chicken.
So at this point I will begin preparing my sauce.
It is a simple chicken jus, similar in base to a turkey gravy at Thanksgiving.
We’re going to begin to heat the sauce, while that’s happening, I’m going to prepare
our salad.
Fresh young coconut, we get several varieties of carrots - yellow carrots, purple carrots,
and orange carrots all from a farm on the north shore.
Dress it with lime juice and cilantro.
Into this bowl we’re going to take a little bit of fresh coconut, take a simple vegetable
peeler and shave it into ribbons.
These ribbons of coconut are crispy, and not something you want to have in big chunks.
We’re doing the same thing with our carrots, take the peeler and do it in the same fashion.
Take your cilantro, no need to chop this, the sprigs are perfectly suitable.
Toss it together.
We’re ready to wrap this dish up, from the sauce, it’s a simple chicken jus, which
we make from roasted bones of the bird.
We add to this a green curry, and we utilize cilantro and basil.
Lots of fresh lemongrass, fresh garlic, coriander seed and kaffir lime.
With these ingredients we turn them into a curry paste.
Take that green curry paste and add it directly to the sauce at the last minute.
Whisk it up, bring it to a boil, the reason being the heat element will bring out the
essential oils I was talking about.
At the base of this dish I’m going to take the finished product of the puree that we
prepared earlier with the sweet potatoes.
At the bottom of the dish, take the leg of our chicken, place it over the top of the
sweet potato.
Take our salad, and at the last minute dress it with lime juice, mix that up, take that
salad, place it right over the top of the leg.
This is one of the simplest dishes we have on the menu, but it’s the most dynamic in
flavors.
Take our breast, place it directly on top like that, take our sauce, simply spoon it
right over the top of the chicken.
Base that chicken with all those beautiful aromatic green curry flavors and let it pool
on the bottom.
This is our lemongrass scented natural chicken, with coconut sweet potato puree, shaved fresh
raw carrot, young coconut, with green curry and cilantro.