Hello my sweets!
The end of summer always feels like a really social time of year, largely because I panic that I haven’t made use of the garden enough (and I’m paying through my nose for it in the insane London rental market), so I invite everyone round to eat on my little terrace.
This week’s recipe is for slow braised coconut caramel chicken, served with pickles and sushi rice, which is a gorgeous one tray dish for an end of summer get-together. You’ll also get the lowdown on my precariously stacked cookbook shelf as I talk you through my favourite books.
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Enjoy!
Sophie x
The Recipe
Slow Braised Coconut Caramel Chicken with Pickles
The idea of caramelised coconut milk has been swimming around my brain for a while, after seeing Nicola Lamb experiment with it for desserts, and Chloe René make a chicken marinade using it. I love the Vietnamese dish cá kho tộ, which is fish cooked in a coconut caramel sauce, and I wanted to give chicken legs similar treatment.
A slow cooked chicken leg is a thing of beauty, and when you braise it in the oven in this coconut caramel sauce (yes, we will be making caramel), the skin takes on that gorgeous chewy quality of Chinese roast duck. Cá kho tộ normally uses coconut water, but I wanted this sauce to have a bit more body, so I went with coconut milk.
Caramel may sound a bit scary, but here are my top tips:
Do not take your eye off it for one second! Things change quickly in the world of caramel - it can be clear one minute and done the next, so stay in the kitchen.
Stirring the mixture will cause your sugar to crystallise and ruin the caramel. To get a bit of movement in the pan, pick it up and gently swirl it around instead.
You want it to be a dark golden brown before you add the liquid, otherwise the caramel won’t have the bitterness needed to counteract the sweetness.
Have your liquids (coconut milk and sauces in this case) ready to go, so that the second your caramel is dark enough, you can halt the cooking process by adding it.
To clean a caramel pan, fill it up again with water and bring it to a boil. This will melt the solidified caramel down, and you can clean it from there.
Serves 4
For the chicken: