Marinade your chicken in liquid smoke to get that smoky, flame grilled flavour in a tiny apartment kitchen. Scales up well, and meal prep friendly.

Time: 3/5
This should get you dinner on the table and lunch for the week in an hour or so.

Effort: 3/5
Easy, but only if you don’t count having to get on an airplane for the groceries.

Crossing the Road

Regular readers will know that I don’t live in the States like most of you do. But I did consume a lot of American media, including a ton of cooking shows, while growing up. What ended up happening is that I developed a sort of voyeuristic curiosity about American food culture.

Especially the sort of techniques that need a lot of space, like grilling over charcoal and smoking brisket low and slow. Maybe that’s because I live in a dense and high cost-of-living metro area where living space is priced at a ridiculous premium, and it’s a luxury to have your kitchen and toilet in two separate rooms. I guess you envy what you can’t have.

I fantasise about one day being able to afford a kitchen that can fit both myself and the fridge inside of it at the same time. I’m not going to be smoking meat on my patio any time soon, unless I win the lottery. But then I learned about liquid smoke from Adam Ragusea (easily one of my favourite content creators), and realised that it was a way to get some of that barbecue flavour without needing the whole setup.

I made sure to get some when I went to Hawaii to visit an old friend. You might see the other spoils from that epic American grocery haul of the century in my other posts – Old Bay for shrimp, cod and chicken, and the powdered ranch on chicken thighs as well as a yogurt-based fajita sauce.

The trip to Costco was a meal prepper’s wet dream, by the way. $5 for a huge rotisserie chicken? Ground pork sold in 6lb sized packs? I would happily load up the back of my trunk and not leave the house all month with a chest freezer well-stocked enough to last me through a nuclear apocalypse.

Alright, enough fawning and back to the food. I’m starting with the hickory flavoured liquid smoke, and saving the mesquite for later. Cracked the seal, opened the lid, took a whiff. Smells like … sausages? Which makes sense, I guess.

It was very potent in the marinade, and made the chicken thighs taste plenty smoky after roasting them in my small oven. It was a bit unsettling at first, because the meat had the texture of chicken but the flavour of smoked sausage. 

But once I got over the mental association between smoke and sausages, it was pretty nice! Very different from the flavour profiles in the Asian chicken and rice recipes I was used to, and a welcome change of pace.

I look forward to trying out the liquid smoke on different meats. Maybe wings, or a pork shoulder roasted low or slow (maybe it would make a great Japanese-American fusion chashu – now there’s a thought). Perhaps even using some of it in a wet rub for ribs!

Dramatis Personae

Served 6.

Chicken thighs – 1kg

Boneless and skin on, as (almost) always. My guess is that at least some of the flavour compounds in liquid smoke are fat soluble, so I want a cut of meat with plenty of fat to capture that.

But I’m definitely curious to see what would happen if I tried brining chicken breasts in liquid smoke, maybe cook them sous vide and sear them off. I get several ideas for every one thing I cook – it’s a good problem to have.

Marinade

2 tablespoons each of cumin, garlic powder, paprika, sugar and liquid smoke. Plus three teaspoons of salt, a teaspoon of Kashmiri chili powder (I keep this around instead of Cayenne pepper because sometimes I cook Indian) and plenty of black pepper.

I wanted to include some more spices to mimic that barbecue style profile, but every store around me decided to stop selling onion powder a couple years ago and I broke the shaker of cumin because my elbow knocked it over while I was doing the dishes. True story. I didn’t exaggerate when I said my kitchen was small.

Nevertheless, the chicken still tasted awesome. So add whatever you like, and the liquid smoke will carry the day.

Vegetables – 1.2kg

Always eat your veggies! This week it’s lettuce, and I get to remind myself why I don’t cook lettuce that often. It takes a while to pry the leaves apart and rinse the dirt off, and then it shrinks down to almost nothing. It’s not the most meal prep friendly vegetable, unlike Napa cabbage, regular cabbage and zucchini.

But hey, some variety is good to have. Different vegetables have different nutrients, so it’s a good idea to cover your bases. And before you ask me why I don’t just eat my vegetables raw, I didn’t grow up in a culture that does that so it’s not something I’m used to. Cooked salads are great, though!

Anyway, this all gets stirred fried for a bit with jarred garlic that doesn’t taste as good as regular fresh garlic, for which I have been ordered by the boss lady to consume in the most expedient manner possible.

Executive summary

1. The night before, marinade the chicken. Refrigerate overnight.
2. Start cooking by making rice. Preheat oven to 200C/400F and like a baking sheet with foil and parchment paper.
3. Line chicken on baking sheet, skin side up. Roast for 30 minutes.
4. Clean, cut and cook vegetables in the meantime.
5. Assemble and serve.
   

Play by Play

Last things first. All the marinade ingredients go into the bag and massaged into the chicken. Then I expel as much air as I can, to ensure maximum contact between the meat and the marinade.

The oven has been preheating for as long as it took me to set up the rice cooker. Time to lay out the chicken and get them roasting.

Now that the chicken is in the oven, my hands are free to prep the vegetables. I like to peel the lettuce leaves off and rinse them off. I always discard the core, although I’ve always wondered if there’s a way to eat them too.

Always wash your veggies! Bugs and dirt do not make for good eats.

Part one of why I don’t think lettuce is meal prep friendly. Here’s about 1.2kg of lettuce from the market, and the same lettuce after the leaves have been washed. Coffee mug for scale. Look at how much volume it takes up!

Part two shown here. It barely fits in the skillet, yet it shrinks down to almost nothing. The amount of vegetables you can cook in one go is a potential limiting factor in how many portions you can meal prep at a time, so this isn’t doing any favours for the meal prep efficiency of lettuce.

Had to use the lid to trap some steam and cook everything quicker. It’d take forever for the heat to reach up and wilt the lettuce enough for me to stir, and I can’t be bothered to cook lettuce in batches after a long day at work.

Like always, things come together at about the same time. The chicken and the lettuce was done by the time the rice cooker finished its work. It’s time to eat.

Mmh, smoky. Like sausage, but chicken.

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