Gnarly Peanut Chicken

 

Ingredients:

  • 2 boneless skinless chicken breasts
  • 2 limes
  • 4 cloves garlic
  • 2 tbsp peanutbutter
  • 2 red chilies
  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • Salt and pepper to taste
Instructions:
  1. Preheat oven on broiler setting to medium-high
  2. Grate zest of 1 lime
  3. Score 2 chicken breasts in a criss-cross pattern
  4. Rub chicken with salt, pepper, and olive oil to taste, and the lime zest
  5. Place chicken criss-cross-side down in a cold pan and set to medium-high heat
  6. In a bowl, grate 4 cloves garlic, squeeze juice of 1 1/2 limes, chop 2 red chilies, and stir in 2 tbsp peanutbutter. Add a splash of water if needed to make a spoonable consistency
  7. Flip chicken over, then spoon on the sauce and put in broiler for 5 minutes
Yield: 2 chicken breasts

Source: Jamie Oliver 5 Ingredient Quick & Easy Food

Tips:

The first time I made this was also the first time I ever zested anything. The recipe says to use the zest of one lime, but since it had me using two I just used both to avoid wasting ingredients. This is sort of a silly sentiment, as by this logic, I'd have wasted the zest of every citrus fruit I've ever used until then. It also said to use the juice of 1 1/2 limes, but I didn't like the idea of leaving 1/2 a lime, so I used the juice of both. Results were a lime-heavy sauce

The peanutbutter doesn't seem like it's working right away but just keep stirring it until the lime juice breaks it down.

This recipe made me a little nervous, as it didn't give a direct time estimate for how long the chicken should pan-fry. It just said to fry it while you're grating the garlic, chopping the chilies, and squeezing the limes. Chicken is a pretty finnicky protein too, as it's dangerous when undercooked and it dries out fast overcooked. I don't think my food prep skills are as fast as Jamie Oliver either, so I worry we won't have the same flow. But both times I've made this using these instructions it's worked out fine.

Description:

One of our wedding gifts was Jamie Oliver's 5 ingredient cookbook. I am being a little sassy by having 7 things listed in the ingredients section of this post, as he tends to sneak in common items without listing them to avoid exceeding the 5 ingredient limit. If I really wanted, I could have separated salt and pepper as two separate ingredients and included water, which would have brought the list to 9.

In part of the recipe, it says to cook it until it becomes "gnarly". I was unaware of the use of this word as a culinary term.

A dish that I've been wanting to make is Tiga Degu, which is Malian Cuisine consisting of chicken and peanutsauce. I don't think this would be an authentic example of that, but it comes close enough to scratch the itch. They even had limes out there, so it would be easy to imagine them incorporating them into their peanutsauce.

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