Riverside Ovens
Sustainable Test Kitchen:
Thai Grilled Chicken

"At the most basic level, we cook to provide nourishment. But that's only the very beginning. We also cook to express our love, our desire to care for others. Some of us cook as an outlet for creative instincts, to fashion out of a set of ingredients something new that is much more than the sum of its parts. Or we may cook to explore different cultures, to better understand the way others experience the world. Many of us cook for solace...." – editors, Cooks Illustrated









For the intentional cook, there are many reasons, motives and moods associated with the cooking experience. The last post was interested in doing some testing of the process of the insta-pot, a relatively new fashion in cooking culture that seems to get support from the home cook and chef alike. With the insta-pot, there are possibilities to solve the recurring problems of time efficiency along with preserving nourishment – you can use good fresh ingredients and keep the good stuff locked in the pot. Time is of the essence.  But even though time saved is a very practical motive for serving a regular dinner, so the notion of slow cooking slow food is another experience altogether and one that allows the cook other entry points into the testing of why we cook and what we cook.  This past weekend I wanted to try the Thai Grilled Chicken recipe out of Cook's Illustrated.  I have been grilling game hens from the basis of the same recipe for twenty years.  I have always enjoyed the prescribed (at least) 45 minute grilling time for these small birds that offer, as Cooks tells us, "a high ratio of flavorful skin to meat." My old recipe called for little more than a skin lather of melted butter, dijon mustard and some chipped rosemary and then essentially let the hens sit over a heat level that

doesn't burn the skin. This slow method not only works its way up, but obviously, because in a covered grill, works its way all the way around the hen and creates a good baking method. There are few more powerful repositories of flavor than the game hen, with its small components moist and carrying any sauce you choose very well over the time duration.  To add one more enjoyment to the process, I had the fortune of being able to cook this time at a small cabin where the grill is located on a deck overlooking a small pine forest which looks down onto a lake.  Sometimes it's a good idea, as the editors above relate, to take a step back from the usual mechanics of the daily cooking routine, and realize that there are all kinds of reasons to enter into the cooking process.  To grill for others a meal with a new recipe in the safe confines of a forest is getting awfully close to the cooking utopia, and one I assume many cooks and chefs alike have considered over the years: 'how could we offer our eaters the experience of the outdoors and good food together?'  We could assume that this process probably tugs to certain strands in the DNA that go far far back; it certainly would not have had to been meat over the fire, but a vegetarian option also sat there in our communal dna right alongside.  To see the trail of coal-fired smoke rise up from the four smoke holes on top of the grill along the limbs of the pines is something that the ancients might very well have taken for granted, but for us, in the middle of busy lives, and offered likely far too many non self-created eating options, its seems a good idea to cherish the time as it moves along as slowly as the summer breeze that circles along the surface of the lake.

I felt like there was no real need to follow the recipe in its entirety in this case.  It is a beautiful recipe and is motivated by what is called "gai yang, it's street food that originated in Thailand's northeastern Iran region but has become ubiquitous throughout the country." The hens in this native case are butterflied and marinated in a cilantro, garlic fish sauce concoction, then served with sweet spicy dipping sauce and sticky rice.  As I was going through the grocery store considering the thirteen ingredients, I considered ahead that I might, at time of cooking, be far more interested in the smell of the grill and the passing of time and the pine limbs than the scrubbing of dishes, so found a nice jar of Thai cooking paste in the Thai section of the store and decided that would be my lather.  No need to butterfly this time, although the pictures of the bamboo rods through the hen halves slow cooking at an elevated distance above the heat looked very alluring to say the least.  I lathered the skin and set them on the grate and listened to the crackle as the slow cooking process did its work under the green hood of the grill.  By the end, the hen disassembled with ease; extra Thai paste was available for dipping. It is a sort of finger maintenance food to be sure. What we gave up, however, in the pre-cooking stages, we gained as deck time breathing in deeply the lake air.