For the past few months, I’ve been roasting chicken thighs a couple times a week with the standard salt, rosemary, sage, and thyme. My brain and heart just haven’t into concocting recipes. But today I decided to create something new – and also go through the many jars of sauces in my fridge. Enter sacha sauce! Purchased for hot pot! Not used for anything else until today!

Time: 10 minutes prep, 40-ish minutes to cook
Servings: 4-6, depending on how much chicken you eat in a sitting.

Ingredients

• 4 chicken legs (drums and thighs together)

Sauce

• 1 heaping tbsp sacha sauce (I used Lee Kum Kee brand)
• 1 heaping tbsp chili crisp (I used Lao Gan Ma brand)
• 1-2 tsp soy sauce (to taste)
• 1-2 tsp fish sauce (to taste)
• 2 tsp honey
• 2 tbsp Chinese cooking wine

Let’s do it!

1. Prepare the chicken by cutting off the tail*, excess fat, and separating the thigh from the drum at the joint.
2. Mix all the sauce ingredients together in a big bowl. I’d recommend starting with 1 tsp soy sauce and fish sauce and then add to your level of preferred saltiness. It’s important to taste the sauce here and NOT when you’ve added the raw chicken. The sauce should taste good! Like you want to drink it out of the bowl, which you will do later after you’ve cooked the chicken and after everyone else has left the room.
3. Add the chicken pieces one at a time to coat.
4. Cover the bowl with a big plate or plastic/aluminum wrap and place in the fridge to marinate for at least an hour.
5. Preheat your oven to 350ºF when you’re ready to cook.
6. Place the chicken in a deep-ish roasting dish (there WILL be sauce and you will want to save it – see above) in one layer, skin side down. Pour any leftover marinade on top.
7. Roast for 20 minutes.
8. Check the temperature of the chicken to make sure it hasn’t over-cooked. 160ºF is done. Mine came out at 130ºF here.
9. Flip the chicken over and baste with the sauce/drippings.
10. Roast until the chicken reaches 160ºF near the bone. In my oven, another 15 minutes.
11. Remove from the oven and let rest for 10 minutes or so. Serve with the sauce, which is probably amazing with rice (went carb-free today). The sauce is basically just grease, but are we going to let all the dieticians and doctors tell us what we can eat? The answer is: sometimes.

*My family doesn’t eat the chicken tail and make kind of a big deal about removing it whenever we go to restaurants. It never occurred to me that you could eat it. I mean, the restaurants also kept the heads on, and you don’t really eat that, right? Anyhow, a coworker once told me that it was her favourite part of the chicken, and I had to use all my willpower not to scream “but that’s where the poop is from!!” even though I know it’s not where the poop is from (it’s from the cloaca – google it if you don’t want to eat eggs anymore). So keep it if you like it. I can’t see nor judge you.