Teriyaki Steak

This is the time of year when I'm willing to spend ages making a dish if I think it's going to come out well, and the time of year when my resolutions about food ('I'll cook dinner every night of the week!' or 'I'll start meal-planning!' or 'I'll start remembering to marinate things overnight the day before I want to cook them!') are coming so fast and furious that I know it's only a matter of time until something falls off the table... hopefully not literally. But while I'm determined to remember to marinate things (surely I'm not the only one who hates this process? The night after I remember to do it, I love it: a delicious dinner with little prep and few dishes... but the night before, when I have to have already done the grocery shopping AND remember to make a marinade AFTER I've already dealt with a different dinner? I usually just can't be bothered), I decided to give this a whirl. My hopes were not high, and when you're dealing with steak that you're pretty sure you're going to ruin, it's easy to get discouraged.

So imagine my surprise when I seared this steak evvvvvver so briefly and it came out delicious! Pink in the middle, tender and juicy with a unique (and very non-teriyaki-ish) flavour, this steak is a perfect dish to make next time you're trying to talk yourself out of ordering takeout again because it's embarrassing that the Deliveroo driver is starting to ask about your family and become friends with your dog. The soy sauce tenderises the meat until it's ready to melt-in-your-mouth, and the wine gives it just enough of a fruity edge to keep the saltiness from being overpowering.

If you can be bothered to remember to marinate it the night before, this cooks up in less than 5 minutes, start to finish (and if you can't be bothered to marinate it overnight, it's fine to marinate it for only a few hours). We served it with Momofuku's Brussels Sprouts with Fish Sauce Vinaigrette- seriously my favourite side dish to go with Asian flavours, and it was so nice I'm already watching out for the next time this wafer-thin steak goes on sale.

I've eaten enough Asian food in my life to be pretty confident that teriyaki sauce does not usually include golden syrup, but this one does (perhaps contributing to that non-teriyaki-ish flavour I mentioned above). If teriyaki is usually made from soy sauce, mirin and sugar, what we have here is a version substituting white wine for mirin (I would have had to make this substitution anyway because evidently there is not a single shop in Edinburgh- including the rich people grocery store- that sells mirin) and golden syrup/corn syrup for sugar. I'm not complaining; it may not be authentically teriyaki, but it was delicious.

The verdict:

4 spoons out of five. This was really tasty, but I have a feeling a large part of this was the specific cut of steak that I purchased, so I'm knocking off a spoon in case it doesn't work so well on other cuts.

ONE YEAR AGO: TOLL HOUSE MARBLE SQUARES
TWO YEARS AGO: HAPPY NEW YEAR!

the recipe:

Teriyaki Steak

the directions:

Mix together all ingredients except steak, making sure to blend golden syrup into mixture as much as possible.
Pour over steak and marinate at least 2 hours or up to overnight.
When ready to cook, heat a cast-iron skillet until it's screaming hot.
Cook steak, a few pieces at a time, making sure not to crowd them in the pan.
After 30 seconds, flip steak and allow to cook for a further 30 seconds on the other side.
Check for doneness and serve.

the ingredients:

1/3 c (2.5 oz) soy sauce
1/3 c (2.5 oz) white wine
¼ c (2 oz) golden syrup (light corn syrup in the US)
½ tsp ground ginger
1 clove garlic, minced
2 lbs (1 kilo) lean steak, sliced very thin

Battle of the Asian Chickens, or, Asian-Chicken Two Ways

Today I present to you two different recipes for Asian-inspired, bone-in chicken… one delicious, and one so caustically salty that you probably should stay away from it unless you are either a goat or just want to know what it feels like to live inside a salt lick.

First of all, let’s discuss the medium: this is really embarrassing, but when I was a broke single girl, my favourite payday treat was buying a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store, and then eating it for three meals a day for three days straight to try to get through it all… but, because I only had ever bought these from the store and don’t (obviously) have a rotisserie in my kitchen, I just always figured I would never be able to make roast chickens as good as the ones from Kroger. (I told you it was embarrassing). Oh well, we all start somewhere.

Consequently, I’m always still amazed when I make a chicken dish that is delicious—but the truth is, it’s hard NOT to make delicious chicken when you’re working with a whole chicken instead of dried-up, flavourless, boneless, skinless chicken breasts. I remain, however, confused as to why every chicken recipe in the box seems to require ‘a whole chicken, cut-up.’ Using our knives, which are fairly decent, sharp, and new, I can’t cut up a chicken and even Judson is always kind of at a loss when it comes to hacking through the breastbone. Are chickens today eating more calcium and thus growing up with stronger bones? Did everyone in the 1950s own a cleaver and butcher block? Did whole chickens used to be sold cut up into their component pieces? Did housewives walk around with biceps like bodybuilders from cleaving chickens every day? These are the questions I just don’t know the answers to, but luckily I have a cooking partner who helps whenever there is knife requirements that my puny arms won’t handle.

Anyway, the more delicious of these two recipes does require you to remember to marinate the chicken—ideally overnight, but a few hours or even less will do if you’re in a rush. Seriously, though: if you have time to marinate this for a night, do it. You won’t be sorry. The acid in the grapefruit juice make the chicken so tender and the soy sauce leaves the skin tight and glossy when it’s done roasting (or barbecuing, if you somehow live somewhere that’s not a frozen tundra wasteland right now). We ate it with roasted green beans, and it was quite possibly the best meal I’ve had all month.

The other recipe requires just as much soy sauce but the chicken is boiled in it instead of marinating in it, and the sauce reduces into a sticky glaze that’s more salty than flavourful. We still ate it, but it wasn’t worth it. Also, in an unrelated funny fact, this recipe was supposed to be for chicken wings only, but the night I decided to make it was in the middle of the floods that are (still) paralysing Northern England, and a weird side effect of Northern England being flooded out is that deliveries can’t make it to Scotland. As an American, it didn’t occur to me that if England was blocked, nothing would be able to get through to Scotland, because I’ve never lived on an island this small. But the day I went to pick up the ingredients, the grocery store looked like the grocery stores in Florida used to look when a hurricane was on the way. So, without access to ‘just wings,’ I ended up with a box of something called ‘thigh tenderloins,’ which did the job well enough but I still wouldn’t recommend this recipe unless you’re looking for a satisfying way to dehydrate yourself.

For previous battle recipes, see Apple Crisps, Macaroons, and Strawberry Shortcakes here and here.

The verdict:
Soy Chicken 1: Crispy, Tender Roasted Asian Chicken

5 spoons out of five. I still have some grapefruit juice leftover and this chicken is so good I’m considering making it again this weekend. Put it in to marinate tonight and you’ll be eating in high-style tomorrow night!

Soy Chicken 2: Soy-Glazed Chicken Tenderloins

2 spoons out of five. These weren’t a total disaster—as I said, we ate them. But they were too salty to impart any other flavours, and the texture was overall a bit too tough for us.

The recipe:

Crispy, Tender Roasted Asian Chicken

The directions:

In a large, shallow dish or Ziploc bag, mix together soy sauce, grapefruit juice, sugar, and ginger.
Add chicken pieces and stir thoroughly to coat.
Cover and marinate in refrigerator for several hours or overnight.
Remove chicken from marinade and brush with oil.
Roast 30 minutes at 200C/400F, then place under broiler (grill for you Brits!) for an additional 5-10 minutes, depending on the strength of your broiler.
Chicken is done when it's glossy on the outside and the juices run clear when it's cut.

The ingredients:

1 c soy sauce
1 c grapefruit juice
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1 chicken, cut into pieces
1/4 c vegetable or other neutral oil

---

The recipe:

Soy-Glazed Chicken Tenderloins

The directions:

Put oil in a cast-iron pan and heat until shimmering.
Add chicken and saute until chicken is yellow.
Add soy sauce until bottom of pan is covered, then sprinkle brown sugar over the pan and stir to combine and coat chicken.
Cook over low heat and allow soy sauce and sugar to reduce into a sticky glaze.
Saute chicken 20 minutes or until done.

The ingredients:

1 tbsp olive or other neutral oil
1 package chicken wings or tenderloins
1 c soy sauce
2-3 tbsp brown sugar

Mandarin Barbecued Chicken

'Oh,' you might be thinking, 'mandarin chicken-- this must be a recipe with mandarin juice or mandarin glaze in it.'

But you would be wrong.

'Ok, then it must be an Asian-inspired dish made with miso and scallions and other Chinese flavours.'

But you would be wrong again.

Because this is basically a curry-roasted chicken... with MSG. So, first things first: I've seen MSG at Chinese groceries since moving to Edinburgh. It's sold in bags like powdered sugar, and I get a headache just looking at it. I'm supposed to make each recipe in this box exactly as it's written, but I'm breaking this rule. It's just too gross to include MSG in the year 2015.

Also, I don't know what kind of knives people had in their kitchens in the 1960s, but all of the chicken recipes in this dumb box seem to call for 'broiler-fryer chickens, cut up.' WHO AMONG YOU, dear readers, OWNS A KNIFE THAT CAN CUT A RAW CHICKEN INTO FIFTHS? And before you assume that your knife set will do so, know that I have a pretty sharp set of knives that are relatively high quality, and they can barely cut through any part of a raw chicken. So if you haven't tried it with your knife, go ahead and assume you cannot do so. Maybe chickens back then were made of lesser stuff, or maybe people like my grandmother just kept a sharpened axe in the kitchen for just such an occasion as... making dinner.*

Anyway, this recipe is going to be best if you can figure out a way to cut up your chicken before you cook it, because it'll cook much faster and be much easier to marinate, but I think you could theoretically roast a whole chicken like this-- though you'd probably want to baste it periodically in the oven to make sure it doesn't dry out.

We made this one night when a friend was coming over for dinner, and, although I didn't marinate it all day (it was a Friday, I don't have time for that on a work day, and I seriously doubt Eleanor did either), it was still pretty tasty. The onions on it were definitely the best part, so next time I'd probably chop them a bit more coarsely so they stick to the chicken as it cooks.

Overall, this chicken had a perfect texture-- moist and tender, with a nice flavour combination because of the variety of spices in the marinade. But the flavour was a bit mild, and the skin didn't crisp up in the way that I wanted it to. The recipe is best made on a grill, though, and since we don't have one, we had to settle for the broiler, which is probably at least part of the problem. If you have a grill, this would be a perfect summertime late evening dinner. Paired with a cold beer and a tomato salad (my favourite kind of salad this time of year), you really can't go wrong.

Finally, I haven't figured out how to take very good pictures of meat. It's really tough to take pictures of brown things, you guys. So I'm adding a photo here of Eleanor at some unknown event, with a zillion other people, all in wedding outfits. I can't imagine what this was for, but I like to imagine that it was a giant sextuple wedding, where they were all getting married at the same time (probably this is not accurate). I have other photos of her alone in this dress, so it was clearly an important occasion, but I have no idea what it was. My grandpa isn't in it, and I think it was probably before they met. Eleanor's family didn't have enough money to have sent her to cotillion, so maybe it was someone else's wedding (BUT WHOSE??). I don't know, but it's very glamourous and I imagine that if I was faced with this dress right now, I wouldn't be able to figure out how to put it on... much less fit in it.

Eleanor is at the very far left, with the greatest smirk I've ever seen. (Also I think the two girls in the middle are probably ghosts.)

*I know my mom's cousins have plucked chickens killed on their grandparents' farm before, so maybe this is not so far from the truth. After all, Eleanor did keep chickens for awhile as a result of a science project conducted by my uncle.

The verdict:

3 spoons out of five. The flavour was great and the meat was incredibly tender, but the skin was not crispy or as flavourful as I would have loved for it to be.

The recipe:

Mandarin Barbecued Chicken

THE DIRECTIONS:

Mix together all ingredients except chicken.
Place chicken in a bowl and pour on marinade.
Cover and marinate in the refrigerator at least 2 hours or up to all day, turning occasionally.
Grill (preferably) or broil chicken about 6 inches from heat source, about 15 minutes on each side or until tender and brown.

The ingredients:

½ c soy sauce (I know. That's a lot of soy sauce in an era when we know how bad sodium is for you. In Britain, all the soy sauce is what would be considered 'low sodium' in the US, and it worked fine, so use reduced sodium soy sauce and you'll be doing your body a favour.)
¼ c orange juice
¼ c lemon juice
Scant ¼ c vegetable oil
1 c onion, coarsely chopped
1 tbsp curry powder
1 tbsp chili powder
1 chicken, cut into 6 pieces