Grilling Chicken Teriyaki
A new direction in how we eat comes with the addition of drop in grills to our outdoor kitchens. There is suddenly a shift in the way we think about food, and preparation becomes less of a hassle and more of a pleasure. Cooking on a grill is a bit like daydreaming, it seems to come habitually, and with great pleasure. Thinking about the joy of eating, the social ritual of the meal, enters into the preparation, and everything becomes a little easier. It could be the thrill of cooking outdoors, the idea of the primal nature of meal preparation on an outdoor fire, or it could just be the idea that we’ll make the whole neighborhood envious from the smells at our house. Whatever it is, it’s tangible, and it doesn’t go away.
In fact, it just gets better with learning, where the collecting of recipes becomes second-nature, and we start to meet people who have the same interests in cooking as we do. It is in this spirit that collecting recipes for grill favorites such as chicken teriyaki becomes a method of learning and discarding and collecting and re-inventing. We like to re-invent, and it’s become the way we cook. With chicken teriyaki, like anything, there are hundreds and thousands of variations, and no two chefs seem to agree completely on what works the best. From the dozens of recipes, there are only generalizations we can make, like, they all include teriyaki sauce. But then there are occasional kinks in this logic, too, when we come across recipes that demand that we make our sauce from scratch.
Perhaps the only thing, then, that we see in common with all the recipes across the board, is the inclusion of chicken and the grill. The rest is variation. Some of our favorite recipes include lemon, sesame oil, and garlic in the marinade. One lets this soak and absorb for at least 24 hours to bring out the sesame flavor throughout the chicken, and care should also be taken to let the garlic brush the meat as it soaks, but not penetrate the flesh too deeply, because the flavor here can be overwhelming. Other variations of chicken teriyaki include ginger, and this really seems more traditional than sauces with garlic. For the actual grilling, use indirect heat, and cook on each side for 6-7 minutes. The essential thing here, again, is experimentation.
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