I was going to make hotdogs, but ended up experimenting and making Chicken Satay with Peanut Sauce brats instead. I was looking for cut up frozen beef, and found 3 kg of cut up chicken thighs and saved skin and breasts instead. Hot smoking on pellet grill now, holding 165 in smoke setting for now.
Chicken Satay is a Thai dish, just chicken breast strips on a stick, grilled over charcoal usually. The chicken always has a characteristic yelliw color and flavor, from being marinated in a mixture of turmeric, ginger, cumin, garlic, coriander, and fish sauce. I make it a lot, and mix up my own spice marinade, so have a lot of experience in how much of each is good.
The grilled chicken strips are usually eaten with “peanut sauce”. This can be a very complicated sauce with 15 ingredients, which I also make a lot. Basically think of fine ground peanuts or peanut butter, brown sugar, coconut milk, diced onions, lemon grass, ginger, galangal, turmeric, lime.
Because wood-grilled or charcoal-grilled chicken satay is always eaten with the rich salty sweet peanut sauce, you always get a mix of charcoal or wood smoke flavor, as well as a brown grilled flavor from hot grillmarks, and all the flavors of marinade and sauce. This is a good opportunity to package all those flavors up into one brat!
Recipe formulation
- Chicken is notoriously hard to get to keep fat bound, especially low-melting chicken fat. Therefore recipe will be driven by high protein extraction, strong binders, and low temps to avoid fat out.
Binders: sodium triphosphate, aka cold phosphates, is the best binder. NFDM is also great. Walton’s has both in their Suregel product, easy to use and a favorite. Applied at 1.5% for strong bind. Additional moisture retention and uptake desired, potato starch is often used in emulsified products to keep juices gelled into meat without showing. Used 1%.
Protein extraction: almost emulsified, but don’t want the liquid that entails. So 3mm ice cold grind, then Kitchenaid mixer on setting 3 for fast max extraction, 5 minutes. - Wood grill flavor needed, so will cook on pellet grill for smoke. Causes higher temp fat out issues, mine can hold 165f in smoke setting, will use that. Browning and grill marks wil be put on FAST later after cook. Alternative is SV cook at 160f with fast grill at end.
- Too much moisture in chicken makes them seem fluffy, so want to keep it at 10%, and I want to avoid SV so some drying from grill or smoker. Flavor notes demand fish sauce and coconut milk both. So will split the 10% liquid 50/50, calculate the salt in fish sauce at 3.8g salt per 15 ml, and add remaining salt.
- Flavor is salty, so 2.5% used.
- The satay itself isn’t sweet, but the peanut sauce you glob on is super sugary. So will go with 2.5% sugar, like a slightly sweer ham. However I will replace the sugar with the 1 for 1 replacement ‘monkfruit sweetener’ from Lakanto. Because brown sugar is normally used, I will add 1T of molasses to give that flavor note.
- To control liquid, will use lemon pepper instead of lime juice. Lemon pepper is mostly citric acid, can’t add much or it makes meat crumbly.
- All other spice amounts based on my experience making satay and peanut sauce.
Ingredients are Described as a percentage of the “meat block” which is meat + fat. In metric, 1000 grams in 1 kg. This allows you to easily calculate for different sized batches. For example: 0.3% spice means 0.003 * meat weight in grams. Say 2kg, so 2000g x 0.003 = 6g spice.
-Meat: 2000g total: chicken thighs 800g, breasts 900g, fat and skin 300g.
-Liquid 11% = 220 ml, of which 120ml fish sauce and 100ml coconut milk.
-Salt 2.5% total, 50g, replaced some with fish sauce at 3.8g salt / 15ml, so 30.4g salt. Needs 20g more salt.
- 1/2c finely ground peanuts, could use peanut butter, didn’t weigh.
-turmeric 0.3%, 6g, 2t
-ginger 0.25%, 4.6g, 3t
-cumin 0.2%, 4g, 2t
-coriander finely ground 0.1%, 2g, 1t
-garlic granulated 0.35%, 7g, 2t
-lemon pepper 0.2%, 4g, 1t
-onion powder 0.5%, 10g, 4t
-lemongrass powder 0.3%, 6g, 3t
-hickory smoke powder 0.125%, 2.5g
-sugar 1.7%, 35g, replaced with monkfruit sweetener 1 for 1 stuff.
-no cure, cooked on 185f pellet grill in 2hr or so.
-Waltons suregel binder 1.5%, 30g
-potato starch 1%, 20g
