Backwards Chicken and Barbecue-Fried Udon

Here are a couple of things I made during the week for dinner. The first picture you see here is what I am calling 'Backwards Chicken'. The name comes from the sort of reverse method of braising and “searing” that I use to get very tender, very juicy and intensely flavored meat, along with crispy, deeply-glazed skin. I will go into this method, or methods of cooking below. 

The second picture is a spicy stir-fried noodle dish that is made with shrimp and leftover meat from barbecued spare ribs. It's another serious flavor-bomb that turned out smoky, and legendarily spicy!
See the pictures below for some notes on how this food was made.
 

Click on the photo above to get a closer look at the skin on this chicken. Flavor country!

This is the plated Udon dish. Noodles, Barbecued Pork, Shrimp, Snow Peas, Sprouts, Scallion. HEAT!

BACKWARDS CHICKEN

I call this backwards chicken because while I actually use 3 cooking methods to finish the dish, I start by lightly braising the raw meat in a highly flavorful liquid. Most braises start with a nice hot sear, followed by the addition of liquid and various other ingredients which stay with the meat until it's done cooking. I really wanted to capture the essence of braised chicken when it comes to flavor and tenderness... but did not want to lose the crispy seared aspect of the skin. Let's face it, no matter how crispy or well seared you get chicken skin, it's going to basically be mush by the time you have braised it in liquid for several hours. So rather than going in the typical order of a braise, I started with simmering the raw meat, cooled it fully, then deep fried it... then glazed it and broiled it. I know that sounds like a lot of abuse for a chicken thigh, but I assure you, if you get your timings and temps correct... The result is truly awesome.

To begin, I put an entire hand of ginger and about 20 cloves of garlic in my Vita-Mix and ran this on high with some water until I basically had a frothy soupy mixture that was almost painfully flavorful. Not really in a good way. This is way too much garlic and ginger for any soup. That was kind of my point. 

I then put 3 cold, raw chicken legs and thighs into a heavy cast iron pot and poured this liquid over it. I added a little additional water to cover the chicken along with some Thai chillies and Kaffir lime leaves. I brought this up to a low simmer, put the lid on and put the pot into a 285F degree oven for about 2 hours. The photo below is what it looked like when I took it out.. Frothy, and kind of gross really.  

Next I removed the chicken from the pot, placed it on a sheet pan and put it in the fridge for about an hour. This firms up the meat, tightens up the skin and congeals and fat or gelatin that may be present. I can assume that the chicken is almost, if not totally cooked through at this point. Although my oven temp was very low, I'm pretty sure this chicken was cooked. The main point, other than cooking the meat, was to use the braising method in order to force a strong, garlic and ginger flavor into it without drying it out. If anything I added moisture to the meat by doing this. 

Next I put about 2 cups of canola oil into my wok, brought this up to temp and fried this chicken until the skin was brown and crispy. No longer the dull, unseared pieces you see sitting on a sheetpan in the picture above. Doing this while the chicken was cold prevented overcooking internally and still allowed for a decent amount of time in the oil. I based all my timing for this fry on how the skin looked. My initial braise assured me that I didn't have to worry about the internal doneness of this meat.

While I don't have any photos of the process, my final step was to lay this crispy chicken out on a silpat and brush it with a glaze which was made from Sriracha, Soy sauce, and Mae Ploy sweet chili sauce.  This was a spicy, sweet, thick glaze that crusted nicely to the chicken skin after about 4 minutes in a very hot convection toaster oven. The end result is the photo at the top of this post. It was served along with some stir-fried spinach. 

Barbecue-Fried Udon

Ok, now for the noodles. I came up with this idea while trying to figure out what to do with some leftover ribs that I had in my freezer. Yea.. I guess I could have just heated them up and eaten them but I wanted to cook... and re-heating just aint cookin!

These ribs were cooked on my green egg smoker in a typical American competition style. They were smoke-roasted over applewood and charcoal for about 6 hours at 225f degrees. At first I thought it might be a little weird to combine the flavors of american barbecue with an Asian noodle stirfry but in case you haven't noticed I'm getting a little crazy with this shit. I had to know!

To mix things up, I also got some shrimp and other veggies to add to the dish. 

Here are some pics.

I bought these little shrimp frozen and marinated them in a little Nam Prik Pao, (Fermented chili and sometimes bean paste) and some VERY FUCKING HOT CAYENNE PEPPER. I got this stuff online and it's the hottest Cayenne I have ever had. 160,000 on the Scoville Scale. That's insane for a powder ground this fine. As you can see from the photo, I did not use it sparingly.

This is a pic of the barbecued pork that I sliced right off the slabs of spare ribs. It's beyond flavorful. It's awesome. It's my pride and joy.  Anyway, I sliced this up against the grain into thin strips for my stir fry.

I also cooked some japanese Udon noodles until slightly underdone and rinsed them under cold water. I tossed them with a tiny bit of sesame oil and set them aside.

To begin this stir fry I added the shrimp and rib meat to a blazing-hot wok along with a bunch of minced ginger and large slices of garlic. After about 2 minutes of this, the shrimp were cooked, the pork was heating through and crisping up a little. The cayenne and chili paste on the shrimp was nicely toasted and coating everything in the wok. I then added my veggies and noodles to the wok. Another 2 minutes of cooking and the dish was done. A few dashes of soy were added and the food was plated. 

After the noodles were plated, I sprinkled them with some finely sliced scallions and squeezed the juice of about half a lime over the whole plate. The heat and smoke of this stir fry played nicely with the fresh, cool lime flavor. 

I have to say though... That cayenne is hot. This dish, the way I made it, would be way too spicy for most people. If I was serving this to a larger group of people I would likely have used 1/8th of the amount of heat in it. 

Round-Eye-Notes:

Sometimes I get tired of using terms like "Asian-influenced" when talking about the flavors or styles of the food I often cook. I would love to be able to say more specific things like, "Szechuan Style, Thai, Korean, Japanese etc..." The reality is that I mix and match ingredients and flavor profiles from all different types of these cuisines all the time... and I do it based totally on what exactly that I want to taste, see or smell when I am cooking. I'm not the only one who does this... actually everyone who cooks does for the most part. I am becoming more and more immersed in cooking with Asian methods and ingredients. For the first time ever I think I may be leaning toward a "specialty" in my culinary life. So bare with me. The only thing I know for sure is that this type of cuisine seems to vibrate at a very familiar frequency to me and while I plan to learn as much as I can about each individual influence within it, I will certainly not be bound to any single one at any time. It's a playground peeps...  Recess is in session!