Let's make Red Chile Chicken

Hi everyone and welcome back to my kitchen. Today I am making red chili chicken either roasted or grilled. It's a recipe I think you should know by heart. And why? Who doesn't like grilled chicken? Who doesn't like roasted chicken? It is something that I think should be in everybody's repertoire but if you love the flavors of Mexico this is really classic. It is going to be coated with a red chili adobo. And I'm going to show you my sort of very simple go-to red chili adobo. I actually make this in big quantities and keep it in my refrigerator. So if I want to do red chili chicken either grilled or roasted I can just go to the to the refrigerator and pull that out and marinate. But I'm going to show you one other thing, one other step. Now this is totally optional but I think it just makes it so much better and that's to brine the chicken. So I have a quart of water here and I have a quarter of a cup of table salt and I'm just going to put that table salt in there. And I'm just going to stir it around until I see that it has dissolved. And then once that has dissolved I'm going to put the chicken in there. Now I'm not working with a whole bird for this. I'm doing what I kind of like and think is very easy to do and that is simply to work with a cut up chicken. This is two breast halves here that are going to go in to our brine. So slide those guys in and then instead of legs and thighs I'm just using only thighs here and I'm using four chicken thighs and I'm going to put them. Now you'll notice that these are skin on and bone in. That's what makes it really good. It makes it really tasty. It's what's going to give you absolutely the best texture. Okay now let's make that that red chili adobo. Usually you would start with dried chilies and toast them and soak them and blend them and strain them and all that. I'm going to sort of take a different approach to it and work with ground chili for this one. But it needs to have some garlic in it and the garlic I think shouldn't be raw here. So I'm blanching it right now and I'm going to put it for one minute in a small microwave safe dish covered with water and at the end of that minute it will basically be blanched garlic. So that will take a whole lot of this strong garlic flavor that can overwhelm everything and the rest of it I'm going to do here in the food processor. And so we're going to start with a jar of ground ancho chili. This is not chili powder. This is just one chili, ancho chili, and it is ground. Okay so no spices, no garlic, no sugar, no salt. Okay just pure ground chili and one of these small containers here which is about two ounces is the right amount for this recipe. So I'm just shaking it all into the food processor there and then I have some water at a gentle simmer here and this is important that this be like very hot water. And I'm going to put the water two-thirds of a cup of water in here like that and then just to make sure that it's all moist and I'm just going to pop it like that. That'll get that started. Okay maybe making that adobo is just not your thing. Well I've got a simple workaround for you. Take canned chipotles and blend them in a food processor or a blender with an equal amount of honey. Then just skip all that marinating. Grill your chicken with salt and pepper and then when you come to that final glaze brush this stuff on. It is dynamite. Now back to the recipe. Now we're going to go back here to pull out the garlic from the microwave. You have to always remember that this is going to be really super hot so don't reach in there and grab it and have nowhere to take it. Okay so I've got the four cloves of garlic now that I will fish out with a spoon and then those are going to go in here into the food processor. Then we'll get that guy over to the side. Now let's talk about spices here. So I always keep a lot of whole spices here so I am going to put a little bit of cumin into my mortar. I keep a small mortar by the stove so that I have it at easy access all the time. We have some Mexican oregano that I'm going to put in here with it and then I will grind those two up. I do have ground cinnamon even though I have some beautiful Mexican cinnamon sticks on hand. I'm not going to try to grind those for this quick adobo here. So I usually keep a small brush in the mortar that I have so that that grinding goes really really fast. So scrape that in there and then I'm going to add the cinnamon just a touch of cinnamon one of the elements that you often find in a red chili adobo and then I have some black pepper which I already have ground into this base here. So I'm going to put that in there as well. All of those spices go together to create what I consider to be absolutely the essential balance of things in a really good Mexican red chili adobo. Okay so now we've got everything but salt in there. We need a scant teaspoon of salt for this marinade. By the way this will make more marinade than what you need so you can just put it into a sealed jar and and put it in your refrigerator. Now a couple of tablespoons of vinegar are going to go in here. Now you can use pretty much any kind of vinegar. It's a small amount for this but typical in Mexico to use in apple cider vinegar but a clear vinegar is fine as well. Now let's just blend everything together until it is as smooth as you can get it. Okay yes it should look almost pasty there. After the chicken has been in the brine for an hour I'll remove it and then we will marinate it and go to the grill. Okay the chicken is ready now. Best to pull it out and pat it dry on paper towels so that we don't dilute the marinade too much here. Now you all know what happens to chicken when you brine it right? Because it to me is a very essential part of making really really tasty chicken. A lot of times when people don't brine it, and as I said it's an optional thing, your chicken can come out with a kind of dry texture but once you've brined it in a salt brine like what we have done it will retain a whole lot more moisture. Okay so pat those dry like that. I'm going to get rid of that and replace it with an empty bowl so that we can do our marinating of the chicken here. I'm going to do this with a glove on just because I find it very easy to do that. I will take half of this marinade that we made here and scrape it into the bowl. The other half of it I'm going to scrape into a small dish because it's going to become a honey glaze to go on the chicken for the last few minutes of its cooking here. So I have a small bowl here that I can scrape this all into like that. Okay so this adobo as I said is something that I find like gold in your refrigerator. It's something that you can use and transfer or translate into a lot of different kinds of marinades but I will tell you it is a very very classic Mexican flavor. Okay so we've got that in there and then we'll put the chicken pieces in here and then sort of start mushing them around in that red chili adobo marinade. Now the two breasts and it's a nice nice amount on top of them. All of them are beautifully beautifully coated. Okay beautifully and lightly coated because remember it is a chili marinade. Okay now next step is to work on some potatoes that we're going to put on the grill alongside this. So what we have here is some potatoes in a bowl. I'm going to drizzle them with some oil and then sprinkle them nicely with salt. Let's see what I can do this way. Maybe the best thing here just toss them with that oil and that salt and then I'm going to drizzle in a little bit that looks good of water around the side of the bowl like that just a few tablespoons. Put a little microwave cover on that and then I'm going to go to the microwave for five minutes to give them a head start in the cooking. That way when they hit the grill they can just absorb that wonderful flavor of the grill but we don't have to worry about a long-term cooking. So five minutes and go and now it's our time to go out to the grill. Okay an oil sprayer is one of my favorite pieces of equipment when I'm grilling. So I have been spraying now the top meaning the skin side of these pieces and I am going to make sure that they are nicely coated in that oil before I lay them down on the grill. Now I have built a two-tiered fire here. Okay that means that I've got the hot side over here. All of the coals are piled on one side here and I have the other side completely without coals and I'm going to let these guys cook now until they are completely like browned and nice grill marks on the skin side of the of the chicken. Cover this thing up. I'm working at around 400 degrees or so and after about 10 minutes or so I will come back and check them and see just how beautifully browned they are underneath. Okay let's take a look at this chicken now and I've got the potatoes after they're five minutes in the the microwave. I tossed it with just a little bit of that marinade that we use for the chicken so they've got a light coating of that on there and then right now what I'm going to do is actually put them on to I have a perforated grill pan come and look at this. Okay so this is just a regular perforated grill pan and it just means that they won't fall through and they'll be easy to get out once I've gotten them on here. Okay so I'm gonna try to put them on one side at the back there to take on the flavor of the grill at the same time now that I am flipping this chicken and I'm going to move it to the back too so let's take a look at this and see where we are. This was not a real hot grill look at that just perfect right okay so I'm going to collect the thighs and the breasts back here if there's ever any sticking don't work fast okay this one feels like it's a tiny bit sticky in that one spot there so I don't want to I don't want to rip anything I got that yeah if you have too hot of a grill of course you'll burn the skin so as I said I heated this grill up to about 400 degrees before we started here and and it seems like it's doing just about the right thing that one's a little bit sticky there okay popped it off flip it over there we go okay now all of this will get its glaze which will be the rest of that marinade that we were working with mixed with some honey and oil everything will get glazed just about 10 minutes before it is ready so we're going to come back and look at this again in about I'm going to say about 15 minutes because remember now we have moved everything to the cool part of the the grill so we're going to just let it coast along I'm going to close this down and let it coast along to that perfect doneness so we'll check it again in about 15 minutes okay the last of the adobo that we made I'm going to add a couple of tablespoons of honey to it you could use agave nectar for this if you wanted to about a tablespoon of oil and then mix all of that together and this becomes our final glaze for that chicken it's really good the sweetness against the chili of course we all know that that's a really winning combination okay once I get that all mixed thoroughly it's back to the grill because I think our chicken is ready to glaze okay so this has been about 375 I had it up to 400 when I put the chicken first on there but I've been coasting along about this temperature which is absolutely perfect for cooking chicken it will keep it nice and juicy and we've got our glaze here and I am going to just nicely pat it all over the top of this beautiful chicken here okay that really looks very beautiful there and I haven't stirred the potatoes around yet because I've kept this nicely covered they're not getting very like browned or crisp or anything like that so it's just fine we have another 10 minutes or so to go if you really want to see where you are temperature wise with the chicken I always recommend a really good digital thermometer and you could stick it in the thickest part of the chicken there and you see we're getting close to that 160 degrees place so I'm going to say five to seven minutes probably because it feels to me like that everything is pretty much done already but we want to set the the glaze on the top and I'll show you what that looks like when it's done okay red chili grilled chicken here is ready for its final presentation if you would like you can cut these breasts in half that's what I usually do so that people can get a half of one of these breast halves here and put the little thighs in here this is um I will say an absolutely delicious I wish you could smell it now because the smell is spectacular here I'm just going to pick this up and tip it so that all of our potatoes go onto the platter here that looks really nice and then we have a final garnish for these potatoes which I really like that would be some Mexican queso añejo you could use parmesan or romano for this they have similar kind of garnishing technique or that you use for that kind of technique and then I'm just going to pull a bunch of cilantro leaves off here and drop those down in there and you have what I would call an amazing warm weather feast here buen provecho