Thai Roast Chicken & Gravy Recipe

Welcome to Hot Thai Kitchen. So the holiday season is coming up so today I'm going to share with you a roast chicken with gravy recipe but it uses some of the most iconic flavors of Thai cuisine. So this is a great way to add a little bit of a Thai flavor to your holiday table without it clashing with your traditional side dishes like your mashed potatoes and all that because the flavors are really quite subtle but it's going to be super delicious. Let's get started. So we're going to start first with the marinade. Now you could use my barbecue chicken marinade but I'm going to show you a simpler version to keep the flavors a little more subtle. So I've got both black and white peppercorns here and always lots in a Thai marinade. Okay after that we're going to go in with some garlic and get that into a fine paste as well. It's sort of a paste, it's not super fine but I'm going to go in with my cilantro roots. So this is what cilantro roots look like, it's simply just the roots of the cilantro plant. If you can't find it, cilantro stems are fine. Now I really want this into a very fine paste. And now I'm going to add some chopped up palm sugar and the sugar is going to help cut the salt and also help with browning. A little salt in there, grind that up until the sugar is dissolved and of course you can just throw everything in a blender if you want. All right so I've got some fish sauce and really the fish sauce is my only seasoning here. And a lot of times in Thai food, fish sauce is the only seasoning you need. But I'm going to add also a little bit of black soy sauce or dark soy sauce and this will just help with color. There we go and then finally some water. It'll help the chicken absorb some of that liquid, a little bit like a quick brine, keep the meat juicy. That is it, that's the marinade. All right so here's our chicken and first we're going to butterfly the chicken, also known as spatchcock the chicken. That's removing the spine so we can open the chicken up and it'll marinate and roast more evenly. And you're just gonna cut the spine out and it should be with good scissors, relatively easy. When you get to this thigh bone part, it's gonna feel a little bit hard because there's usually a piece of thigh bone there. If you just sort of maneuver the scissors inward a little bit, you can usually cut around it and so there's usually a hard part there. And then once you get to this rib cage, it becomes easier from this point on. I could have also removed the wishbone first. So there's one side and then you repeat the same on the other side. These scissors aren't as good as I hoped but it was only $4.99. So really what did I expect? Yay! Okay we're gonna save the spine because we'll use it for the stock. Now when you open up the chicken, there's a little cartilage right there and so I'm gonna just make a little slit with my knife through the cartilage like that and press it open like a book and it should just sort of flatten out like that. Okay and now we've opened up a whole bunch of surface area for marinade penetration and it's also a little more interesting looking when you present it at the end. Trim off all this big fatty bits. This is going to produce a lot of fat in the roasting pan and then you just have more to skim off when you make the gravy, so I just go and trim off all the fat. So I am going to make sure the marinade gets under the skin, especially the breast, to make sure that it's really really flavorful. So all you have to do is stick your fingers underneath the skin and just make a pocket and this is commonly done in western cuisines. You may have done it before and now I'm just gonna add some of our marinade into each side of the breast and now you're just gonna sort of massage it through. We're gonna do the same thing underneath the thigh skin and this is why spatchcocking the chicken is also good because now it's really easy to get the marinade under the thigh skin and now I'm gonna pour the rest of my marinade. Rub the wings, rub everything. We're gonna let this marinate for 30 minutes, that's all it takes. This is a strong marinade and so this is why I love this recipe too, you don't need to plan this out days ahead of time and then halfway through I like to just come back and redistribute the dressing, give it another rub and make sure everything is well evenly coated. We're gonna make the quick stock for the gravy and so I've got the spine that we cut up. Notice that I removed the butt because the butt is really really fatty. Believe it or not in Thailand they sell deep fried chicken butt as sort of like its own thing but anyway too much fat. So just water, just enough to cover it. I'm gonna let this simmer for about 20-30 minutes, whatever you've got time for. So now we're gonna prep our herbs. Now traditionally the western style roast chicken gets stuffed with all sorts of herbs in the cavity right? So in a similar way that's what we're gonna do but we're gonna make a bed for the chicken to lay on. So I've got some lemongrass here and I'm actually going to also use the top which we don't normally use. So I'm going to remove the little end bit here and then just with the back of my knife just smash. There you go. Note I am using not the big roasting pan but just a quarter sheet pan because the roasting pan I find the sides are too high and the sides will actually prevent heat from circulating around the chicken evenly and so the bottom half of my chicken tends to not brown as nicely. So for this because our chicken is flat I prefer something with a shallower rim. And then my galangal is going in just on top. Now you don't have to have all the herbs I'm using. Some ginger, some lime leaves which I'm just going to tear into big chunks. Okay and then finally some shallots which I chopped up. But before I put the chicken on this herb bed I'm going to pour some water on it and this water is going to help steam the herbs, help the flavors come up and infuse into the chicken better and it'll also prevent the chicken juices from burning too quickly. And we're gonna put the chicken one two three up on this bed here. Big thighs this one has. If you want you can tuck the wings under here so they don't darken too quickly but I think right here is fine. Brush this chicken with some oil and that's just to help the skin brown and crisp. While the chicken is roasting you want to keep your eyes on the pan. Once the liquid dries up and the bits on the pan starts to brown you want to deglaze the pan a little bit with some water to prevent those bits from burning because that is going to be part of the gravy. All this liquid here if you can see that's all good stuff that we're going to use as part of the gravy and that's all the stuff that's got the herb flavor in it as Okay I want to put all the herbs on the bottom of the serving plate so that way when you serve it on the table people sort of you know get a visual cue of what flavors went into this chicken right? Okay now is the best part, the gravy. This is the spine that I've been simmering for about 20-30 minutes. I'm just gonna remove it along with any sort of scum and fat that has floated to the top. So now I'm going to add the juices from the roasting of the chicken. Lots of good things going in here. The marinade that we had left over from the chicken, don't throw that away. We want to add the marinade right into here. Match the flavor of the gravy to the flavor of the chicken and now I'm going to bring this to a boil because we had raw chicken juice in there from the marinade so we want to make sure it's all cooked off and you can skim this off a little more if you wanted to and now what you want to do is give it a taste and if it is too thin, sort of too diluted at this point, let it reduce a little bit so you get a more concentrated flavor. Oh I like that, nice and peppery but I will reduce it a little further, it's a little weak. That's good, that looks better already. If you have juices that's been collecting from under the chicken, pour that in at this point because that's all chicken juice, chicken flavor without of course pouring the chicken right off. This part is sort of optional, sort of not. I'm going to add some coconut milk and I think it adds definitely a touch of Thai exotic flavor to it and you can add as much or as little of you as you want depending on how strong of a coconut flavor you want, a little bit more and now to thicken this gravy, so I've got some cornstarch here, just enough water to dissolve the cornstarch, you never add dry flour into a hot liquid, you will get lumps you will never be able to get out. Only half first and see where we're at and you want to bring it back to a boil because that's how you know the cornstarch has reached its full thickening power. I'll show you a little trick that I do to make the gravy really sort of dark and rich, I'm going to add some black soy sauce of course, what else? But now just look at that, this stuff is so useful, very nice and also a little squeeze of lime. Now you don't want to make this sour but right now it's very rich and luscious and the little squeeze of lime will brighten it up a little bit, sharpen it and they do this even in western style gravy, it really brightens everything up. That's good, yeah! Check this out, my god! So one of the benefits of spatchcocking your chicken is that it is so much easier to carve because it's sort of like all the way there, ready for you to cut it open. I am a thigh kind of girl, I think y'all know that by now. There we go, smells so good. Just take a little bit here, make sure it gets some skin. There's almost no such thing as too much gravy. So tender and so flavorful and the gravy is rich and a little bit coconutty, it's subtle enough though that it's not going to clash if you want it to have mashed potatoes or roasted cauliflower, whatever it is. So I hope you give it a try, the recipe as always is on hotthaikitchen.com and when you try it, send me a photo, I would love to see them and I will include some of them in my newsletter and you can send those photos to me on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram and oh if you haven't subscribed to the show, here's the subscribe button here and I will see you next time for your next delicious Thai meal.