Pacific & Hawaiian · Main
Huli Huli Chicken
- Intermediate
- 80 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with wood-smoke running underneath, char used as punctuation, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 1.5kg chicken thighs, bone-in, or a spatchcocked whole bird
- Sauce: 120ml pineapple juice, 80ml soy, 60g brown sugar, 2 tbsp ketchup, ginger and garlic grated, splash of sesame oil
- Reserve a third of the sauce BEFORE the chicken touches it, the basting law
- Charcoal, ideally with a chunk of kiawe (mesquite) for the roadside smoke
- Rice and mac salad; a smoke plume visible from the highway, traditionally
Equipment
Grill · Grater / zester
The skills inside
Butchery basicsGrilling over live coalsMarinating: acid, salt and time
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · soy · sesame
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Marinate the chicken in two-thirds of the sauce, 4 h to overnight. 240 min
- Grill over medium coals, turning (huli means turn, and the dish is named for the shout) every 5–7 min. 7 min
- Baste with the reserved sauce on each turn; the pineapple sugars want to burn, so keep the chicken moving and the heat honest.
- 30–40 min total to lacquered mahogany and juices running clear. Rest; chop; serve over rice. 40 min
How it should come out
- The lacquer is even and glossy over the whole piece, dark amber to mahogany, thick enough to hold a fingernail track, with no blistered black patches on the thin edges and no beads of carbon in the skin folds.
- The glaze is set and tacky rather than wet: a rested piece leaves no sauce puddle on the board after a minute, and the coating stays put when the piece is turned.
- Lift the skin at the edge of a thigh: the fat beneath has rendered away and the skin lies tight on the meat, not floating on a soft white layer.
- Thigh reads 75C at the bone, juices run clear, and the meat beside the bone shows no translucent pink.
- The last coat has had fire time on it: no thin slick of uncooked sauce anywhere on the piece, no raw garlic or ketchup edge in the taste, and the sweetness reads caramelized rather than stirred in.
Where it goes wrong Left too long between turns, so the pineapple sugars run past lacquer into carbon on the down face while the up face sits pale and slack: one side black and bitter, the other barely coloured.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Pinot Noir or Gamay
- Also Right
- Chenin Blanc
- From the Taps
- Bière de garde
- Zero-Proof
- Verbena iced tea
Chicken is wine’s most agreeable partner. Match the SAUCE, not the bird: cream to oak, tomato to Sangiovese’s acid, herbs to Loire whites.
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