This seemed like a simple enough recipe so we figured we'd do it as a kinda-snack followed by some ramen for dinner. It's basically marinated chicken, with a sauce, or 'dressing', made from a small list of ingredients. Looking at the ingredients as I pulled them from the fridge, I was a little nervous.
We then, skeptically, went to work on the 'peanut dressing' which calls for first, cooking the ketchup before adding the rest of the ingredients.
It just...didn't look too appealing. If we whisked it up really good, it didn't look bad, but it 'broke' really easily. The taste was actually pretty good, but, after 10 seconds of whisking, it broke in about 10 seconds into some ugly red oil/peanut butter mixture. We pushed on. As a friend once told me while we were offroad motorcycle rally racing...P.O.R. or..'Press/Push on REGARDLESS'. so POR we did.
I'm loving using more grapeseed oil than olive oil for things like this. I can get a really good sear. I also read an interview with Thomas Keller recently, where he promoted using more oil than not on things like this with the reasoning of getting a more even sear, and not worrying about the amount of oil, because whatever you're cooking isn't really going to pick it up anyway. I'm sold.
Time to plate....so we cut up some scallion, and bring out the 'dressing'. It looked, well...it didn't look good. I whisked some more, and before I got the camera, it started 'breaking' again.
I'm not sure what I did wrong with the dressing, perhaps the Skippy or maybe my brand of chili sauce?
In any case, here is one to match the book...I even had a glass plate. Although, it's not as sharp as I would like. I was a little bummed by the sauce breaking to fiddle with my camera on this one, sorry guys.
Thoughts: The marinade is great! The chicken was good, but the sauce, well, not so good. I guess the flavor was ok, but the consistancy was just unappealing no matter how I tried to thin it/thick it with water. I'll get to this one again though...does anyone have any suggestions?
P.S. We ended up using the extra chicken and making some ramen with some of the carrot stock from the book and some chicken stock...MAN. Delicious!
Peanut butter is a stabilized colloid, which means that the globules of fat (in Skippy's case, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil) are broken up into super-small drops, then dispersed throughout the mixture. At that point, they add a stabilizer (aka preservative) to keep it dispersed, giving you that nice creamy texture. Natural peanut butter doesn't have that, which is why you get that oil separation when it sits in your closet.
ReplyDeleteWhen you heat the peanut butter rapidly, that nice stabilized colloid goes away, causing that separation of the peanut oil, which is probably why your sauce broke. Solution? I'm not sure, but maybe heating up your peanut butter more gently, or maybe thinning it out with some hot tap water first.
Sorry about the science lesson - I am a chemistry teacher, after all...