Chicken Yakitori
Ingredients
6 boneless chicken thighs, or 4 chicken breasts
Bunch spring onions or packet young leeks
Japanese seven spice powder (or paprika)
Bamboo skewers, soaked
For the sauce
300 ml light soy sauce
150 ml mirin
100 ml sake
100 g sugar
Your first task is to make sauce by simmering the ingredients in a saucepan. This could take a fair amount of time, as much as 20 mins, but make sure you keep an eye on it to ensure that the sugar doesn't burn. You want a syrupy texture which will cling to the chicken when it grills. Anything too liquidy will just roll right off.
Cut the chicken into cubes around 1 inch square. I use the first joint of my thumb as a guide - the most important aspect of this is not to get the chicken exactly 1 inch in all directions, but to ensure that all the pieces are roughly the same size so they'll cook evenly.
Thoroughly wash your spring onions or leeks and cut them into the same sized lengths.
Skewer the chicken and leek alternately onto your soaked bamboo skewers.
Put your chicken skewers under the grill and allow the chicken to go white on both sides. Now brush on your thick yakitori sauce and continue to grill until the chicken is brown and glossy, basting as you go along. Once you get the colour you like, the chicken should be cooked - I've never had raw chicken with the proper yakitori glaze on it, so unless your grill is industrial strength, your chicken should end up the same as mine! Turn the skewers as you go along, but don't be tempted to add a whole heap of sauce at once as it'll just fall off and burn.
For your bento box, you should leave the skewers to cool and maybe pour some of the extra sauce into a side dish container for drizzling on later. For dinner, serve the skewers hot, drizzled with extra sauce, with short grain rice.
NOTES
Don't squash the chicken up against other pieces of chicken - you want a little space to ensure all the meat is cooked through. The leek in between each piece of chicken will help to separate out the meat and ensure the finished dish looks colourful.
I love this sprinkled with shichimi tougarashi, which literally means 'seven flavour chilli'. These seven flavours vary from brand to brand, but popular additions include sesame seeds, orange peel, ginger, seaweed, mustard seeds and poppy seeds. Plain chilli powder will be labelled ichimi tougarashi.
I ate this dish in the grounds of Sensoji Temple in Tokyo, and the way it was prepared there was by taking precooked (cold!) chicken skewers, dipping the whole thing into a deep vat of yakitori sauce, and then slinging it on the charcoal grill until it sizzled. The result was fairly disconcerting - cold chicken inside, searing hot on the outside, but coated with a gloriously rich sauce which had the benefit of days worth of meat juices from all the chicken skewers that had been plunged in it. In Japan, it's also common to use many different parts of the chicken, including the gizzards, skin and various organs like the heart and liver for these skewers. You can probably replicate this at home - if you dare - as chicken livers are fairly easy to get hold of.