Week 2 of the 2020 Chicken Challenge: Vietnamese Caramelized Ginger Chicken

Recipe adapted from A Bird in the Hand by Diana Henry.

If there’s one cookbook I can blame for kicking off previous chicken challenges, Diana Henry’s A Bird In The Hand is it.    It’s a glorious cookbook –one of my most used.    Diana shares my love of dark meat chicken, and pays full homage to it here.    There are whole bird and chicken breast recipes in here, but mostly it’s all about the thighs and drums.

This is also the cookbook that I asked for and received from the husband for Christmas 2015 that escalated his teasing about me cooking chicken all the time and causing me to kick off the first "Month of Chicken".  

(For the record....yes, I cook things other than chicken.   But like normal people, chicken is on the menu 2-3 times a week.)

I had to go digging a bit through this book to find a recipe I haven’t made before (there’s not a lot left), but settled on the Vietnamese Caramelized Ginger Chicken.    

Serves 2.

I mixed together in a glass dish:

3 bone in, skin on chicken thighs, trimmed

1 teaspoon sugar

2 Tablespoons fish sauce

2 Tablespoons grated ginger

6 garlic cloves, smashed

1 red fresno chili (or similar) sliced, seeds removed (leave the seeds if you like spicier)

I covered this and chilled overnight in the fridge, occasionally giving the thighs a shake and a turn to redistribute the seasonings.  

A note on prepping the chicken thighs.....I like to trim off excess fat and skin to neaten them up and so there's not as much rendered fat.   I use poultry shears for this - I have a good set from Wusthoff and they are one of my most used pieces.   This particular recipe asked that I cut the thighs in half through the bone.   I'm not really sure what the purpose of cutting the thighs in half would be ~ regardless, I don't have a meat cleaver (surprisingly) so I opted to leave the thighs whole.

Fish sauce is basically liquid anchovy – it won’t taste fishy, but it gives a deep savoriness to the dish.   When I took the lid off after the 24 hour marinade, the aroma was amazing.

Just as an FYI – fresh red fresno chilis are hotter than a jalapeno but have a nice sweetness to them.   However, when you cook  – as you will in the sauce – the heat seems to mellow down to more manageable levels, which makes a red fresno my hot pepper of choice in a dish like this.

For the sauce, you’ll need:

A little oil

1 small onion, cut in half and sliced thin

1 cup of chicken stock

Zest of 1 lime (reserve rest of lime to finish)

Reserved marinade (including garlic/peppers/etc)

1 Tablespoon sugar

When ready to cook the next day, I scraped all the garlic/peppers/etc off the chicken but saved them and the marinade, as they’ll be part of the sauce.

I heated a skillet large enough to hold all 3 thighs to medium high with a little oil and put them skin side down to brown for a few minutes.    Because there’s a liquid marinade, the skin isn’t really going to get crispy, but that’ll be fine.    After a few minutes, I flipped them over and browned the other side of them as well.    Once both sides were browned, I removed the thighs from the pan to a plate and used a paper towel to blot up some but not all of the fat out of the pan.   

I added the sliced onion to the pan and sautéed just for about 2 minutes, using a wooden spoon to scrape up some of the bits from the bottom of the pan, then added the onions to the chicken thighs on the side.

So here’s the fun part….the caramel component of the “caramel ginger chicken”.     I added 2 tablespoons of water to the pan and 1 tablespoon of sugar.    The water deglazed the pan so the liquid immediately turned brown – and mostly evaporated because the pan was fairly hot.    The problem with this is that because you now have a reduced brown liquid in the pan, you’ve removed the usual visual clues of caramelizing sugar.     I just stirred the pan and kept sniffing for the whiff of burnt caramel you get when the caramel is just about to burn past redemption.   (Yeah…how’s that for helpful how to cook this info?)    It was a small amount of sugar and a hot pan and it didn’t take more than 2 minutes.

As soon as I got that slightly burned odor, added the chicken stock, and my caramel immediately hardened, which was very gratifying – if I hadn’t cooked it long enough, it wouldn’t really have done that.    

I brought that back to a boil, stirring to break up the caramel and melt it into the chicken broth.   Added the reserved marinade, the onion, the lime zest, and the chicken – skin side up – back into the pan and turned down the heat to just under medium.   

According to the recipe, you just finish it off on top of the stove by simmering it uncovered.    I wasn’t overly happy with the color on my chicken skin and I wanted the sauce to cook down more, so I opted to crank up my oven to 425F and put the whole skillet in the oven to finish off for about 20 minutes.    

That was absolutely the right thing to do  - the skin browned up beautifully and the sauce reduced to a lovely thick, jammy consistency.

To finish:

Juice of 1 lime

2 scallions, sliced thin

¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro

Once I pulled the skillet out of the oven, I squeezed the lime over the chicken and sprinkled on the cilantro and scallions.

I served the chicken with steamed jasmine rice and fresh broccoli.

Overall Rating:  7 of 10.    This was a tasty dish with nice complexity.   The lime juice, cilantro and scallions gave the dish a fresh pop of flavor and the fish sauce and caramel added to the depth of the sauce.    The pepper mellowed after cooking in the sauce but left a distinct undertone of heat.  While this was tasty, it's probably not something that would make it's way into regular dinner rotation.

Ease of Preparation:   5 out of 10.   Requires advance planning as chicken is best marinated overnight.   Requires some harder to find ingredients, and leaves some leftover fresh ingredients that you’ll want to plan to use before they go off.     If inexperienced caramelizing sugar, may have difficulty with that step.

Will It Freezer Meal?    Probably not as is.   Could possibly make it with skinless thighs up to finishing the sauce and then freeze, adding fresh cilantro/scallions/lime once thawed and reheated.