Eleven-Spice Chicken

Saturdays is a big thing here at our house. While everyone in our neighborhood shovels the snow from their driveway, goes shopping or runs errands, my family unplugs and relaxes with good food, great conversation and awesome friends. This is my Freedom Friday post, and this is my Eleven-Spice Chicken recipe.

My family lives a hectic lifestyle. I can’t tell you how busy my wife gets hauling the kids back and forth to their activities or how I manage to stay sane doing the same thing in the evenings. But the day we look forward to the most is Saturday. Saturday is our day. Actually, it’s my wife’s day, since I get to treat her with one of my most delicious recipes. She enjoys the food. I enjoy the cooking. And when we have company over, it makes for a delightful evening of giddiness and good time.

Born from my many Saturday food experiments comes my Eleven-Spice Chicken recipe. Yep, this is a true-blue, Jack Flacco original just like the sushi recipe I wrote about a few weeks ago. How this recipe came about was from watching nothing but the Food Network for a whole year and trying various BBQ recipes from multiple hosts. I tried a myriad of spices to get the right mix of what I liked. Some meals come out from the oven smelling incredible. Some—not so much. I would tweak the ingredients slightly and try again until I got the combination right. I did this until one day, my son said, “Boy, is this ever good!” That’s when I knew I had something. When I finally tasted it, he was right, “Boy, is this ever good!”

Now, if anyone ever asked, I used to hold on to my recipes like gold. Never quite revealing everything I’d put in them. Then I thought, that’s kind of selfish. The whole point of cooking is to share a great experience with people and have them try something unique. Something they never tried before. What better way to do that than to share it with you all!

Here we go, then…

Ingredients:

• Black pepper
• Brown sugar
• Cayenne pepper
• Coriander
• Cumin
• Curry powder
• Garlic powder
• Ginger powder
• Onion powder
• Paprika
• Salt
• Skinless chicken thighs and/or chicken legs

What prep looks like:

Directions:

• Buy quality, skinless chicken. I tend to purchase my chicken thighs and legs from Costco. They have them packaged nicely and the thighs are already skinless, so you’ll save some time with prep. Also, you get a lot in the package, which will allow you to save money in the long run.
• Get yourself a deep skillet and set your chicken in there. Some have argued chicken tastes better in a metal skillet as opposed to glass. I’ve tried both and I can’t really tell which tastes better. It’s going in the oven, not the BBQ. I’ll leave that up to you. Live on the wild side!
• Spice the chicken. You’ll notice all the ingredients are powders. There’s a reason for this. With powders, you can control how much of a spice you’d like to taste in the meal. My rule of thumb is to put in what you like. Here is how I do it: Salt the meat. Nothing worse than tasting bland meat. Then sprinkle liberally all the other ingredients except for the brown sugar. Do it for both sides. Once you’re done, take a teaspoon of brown sugar and sprinkle it on one side as your last ingredient. When the dish comes out of the oven, you’ll find the sugar will have melted and caramelized over the chicken, helping to seal in the juices. I also use brown sugar because it contains molasses, which gives the dish an extra edge of rustic flavor over white, flavorless sugar.
• Finally, preheat the oven to 375°F/190°C, cover the dish with tin foil and slip it into the oven for an hour. Once complete, take it out and enjoy!

If you like this recipe, pass it along.

Do you have any chicken recipes you’d like to share? If you’ve cooked this, how did it turn out?