Get ready for an intensely savoury chicken and rice experience! Good things happen when you round out the strong flavours of miso with some sweetness and acidity.

Time: 3/5
I timed myself on this one. An hour from start to cleanup for 6 portions, including a few minutes to set up the marinade.

Effort: 2/5
Oven and rice cooker just make prepping so easy!

Much Miso, Much Flavour

Here’s yet another low effort, high reward recipe for a chicken thigh meal prep! Consider this part of the same family of oven prep recipes with Yogurt Mint Chicken, Tangy Garlicky Chicken and Barbecue sauce Marinated Chicken. At this rate I should be calling myself Chicken and Rice instead of Served with Rice, but I like to keep my options open.

Anyway, I was making another batch of my miso honey salmon when I wondered if the same marinade would work for chicken thighs. After all, it works for cod too, and good things tend to happen when you take the intense savouriness and mild, pleasant funkiness of miso and round it out with some sweetness and acidity – perhaps you might also like to try roasting cabbage with miso paste.

I’m glad to report that I was right. The marinade was quick to put together, the chicken picked up a lot of flavour from the overnight marinade, and the cooking process was as easy as laying them out onto a foil lined baking sheet and throwing them in the oven. Cleanup? What’s that? I can’t hear you over the sound of me tossing the foil lining into the trash can and calling it a day.

Just because I serve it with rice doesn’t mean you have to. I’m sure this will make a wonderful topping for a salad, an ingredient in a sandwich, or a side dish for a pasta. But for optimal meal prep efficiency, I have yet to find something lower effort than just setting and forgetting the rice cooker.

(Looking for more low-effort, high reward recipes for chicken and rice? Go check out the post on Hakka-style salt-roasted chicken.)

Dramatis Personae

Served 6.

Chicken thighs – 1000g

I’ve said it and I will say it again: skin-on, boneless chicken thighs are the GOAT of meal prep protein. You don’t have to worry about it going dry, no fussing about hitting the exact internal temperature, stays moist on reheating, and the taste of well-browned chicken skin is one of the best things in life.

You may choose to use bone-in thighs and trade flavour for volume efficiency (space is limited in an oven, and bones take up space). You may go with skinless thighs or use breast to trade flavour and juiciness for lower calories. But for me, skin on and boneless is the perfect balance of taste, nutrition and convenience.

Depending on the relationship between how much chicken you want/need to eat per meal and the size of the thighs, you may need to dice up the chicken to make it more divisible. In my opinion this is easier done after the chicken is cooked, but if you cut up the chicken raw, you can benefit from the greater surface area and pick up more flavour from the marinade.

Marinade – whisk together 1 tbsp miso, 1 tbsp light soy sauce, 2 tbsp honey, 1 tsp vinegar.

My usual rule of thumb when it comes to seasoning proteins is about half a teaspoon of salt or one teaspoon of salty stuff (be it soy sauce, oyster sauce or anchovies etc) for every meal. You can get away with more when seasoning marinades that don’t get repurposed into sauce, since not all of the marinade makes it into the final dish.

My miso already comes combined with kombu and katsuobushi extract, and I suspect it’s why the chicken came out so ridiculously delicious. Feel free to add some dashi to your marinade to replicate this effect. Soy sauce can be substituted with salt and water, and honey with sugar.

Here’s a hack I learned when trying to improve on my Gyudon: the tiny touch of vinegar isn’t there to make things taste sour per se, but a bit of acidity in the background makes a huge difference to the taste of a dish. Don’t skip this – any type of vinegar will work, although I think the floral notes of lemon or lime juice would either be too distracting or will be straight up lost in this flavour profile that is so dominated by umami.

Vegetables – 1200g of cabbage shredded, two cloves of garlic sliced, sautéed in a bit of oil with salt to taste and a lot of white pepper

Always eat your veggies! Cabbage is a great meal prep ingredient, which will definitely rank highly on my tier list of meal prep ingredients if I ever get around to making one. They’re dense (one of mine weighed about 800g) and they don’t shrink by too much, so there’s less volume to manage in the wok. That translates to more portions per batch, and batch size in turn is a major factor in the time it takes to meal prep.

Cabbage is also super simple to prepare – simply rinse off, and cut into shreds with a knife and you’re good to go. Adding to the allure is the fact that they keep very well, so you don’t need to worry about buying more than you cook. I remember buying a huge 3kg head of cabbage just before Covid lockdowns, keeping it in the fridge, and just lopping off wedges of it to cook over the course of two weeks!

White pepper and cabbage is a winning combo that I borrowed from Japanese stir fry (like this Yasai Itame by Ayana Gohan). You know how cabbage develops a lot of sweetness when you caramelise them a bit? The earthy and woody notes of white pepper go really well with that flavour. Bonus points if you also add some carrots for more colour and vitamins!

Executive summary

1. Whisk together the miso, soy sauce, honey and vinegar. Taste and adjust, then massage the marinade into the chicken.
2. Start the rice and preheat the oven to 180c/350f. Line baking sheet with foil and parchment paper.
3. Lay chicken in one layer on the baking sheet, skin side up. Roast at 180c/350f for about 30 minutes.
4. In the meantime, wash and cut vegetables.
5. Sauté or stir fry cabbage and garlic in a wok or a pan, with a bit of cooking oil, and season to taste.
6. Start cleaning up and dividing food into containers while waiting for the chicken to be done.
7. Assemble and serve.

Play by Play

Last things first. Miso is pretty strong, and it’s always possible to add more of an ingredient to something so go light at first. You want to taste and adjust the seasoning before you add the raw chicken. My honey stubbornly refused to leave the bottle, and I ended up adding another two tablespoons of sugar before I was happy with the balance.

The mixing bowl is already dirty from the marinade, and it’s dishwasher safe so I might as well do the marinating inside of it. Mix well, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight. Alternatively, you could do this in the morning and cook it the same night.

Time to cook! I am definitely overcrowding the baking sheet, but I care about batch size more than I do about browning. The skin will get plenty brown from facing up the entire 30 minutes anyway.

Here’s how I prepare cabbage for stir frying. Quarter, core and shred. You can cut the core very thin and cook it along with the rest, but expect it to be quite a bit more crunchy than the leaves if you don’t give it a decent head start.

The rice is cooking, the chicken is in the oven, and the vegetables are ready for cooking. I began with the garlic, then added the cabbage when I could smell the garlic. Did the cabbage get a little char because of an intentional choice on my part, or was I distracted by washing the cutting board and knife? Either way, slightly charred cabbage is delicious. Pepper generously.

As promised, the skin browned just fine. Looks promising! Let’s plate up, garnish with some sesame seeds and see how we did.

Not too shabby, if I say so myself! Salty, umami, slightly sweet and funky, and the vinegar is imperceptible while subtly working it’s magic in the background.

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