One of the undoubted favourites in Thai cuisine, leaving aside touristy stuff, is grilled chicken. It is usually served with som tam (Thai papaya salad) and sticky rice (glutinous rice).

Getting a good recipe is difficult. I have 3 from my collection of Thai cookbooks, and they can be best described as not having any commercial potential. So, I have been experimenting, with a fair degree of success, but still not at the point that I can say “This is it”.

Last night I made another change to my recipe, and instead of grilling the whole chicken, I just roasted it. To be honest, I was lazy to set up the rotisserie and just used the smaller oven. The fan supposedly gives the effect of a rotisserie, but moves the air around the chicken instead of moving the chicken - so the manual claims, doubtless with input from the marketing department.

Anyway, I decided to try the circular heating element in addition to the upper and lower elements, and this time I positioned the roasting tray on the lowest rack level. This positions the chicken so that most of it is directly in front of the fan. Not a good idea. Within 20 minutes it became apparent that spots were going to char long before the chicken would be done. I dropped the temperature from 180°C / 360°F to 160°C / 320°F for 10 minutes and raised the rack 1 level so that only the top third of the fan blew directly at the chicken.

When I was comfortable the chicken would not char, I raised the temperature to the original setting. By then my calculated timing was out of course, and I was flying by the seat of my pants. No matter, at least I had things under control. (For more on the circular element and timings, please see my earlier post under category “roast chicken”).

The chicken was done 10 minutes later than I expected, though I must say that I was deliberately trying to get the breast meat to the point where it just crosses from ‘moist’ to ‘not moist’. You see, Thai grilled chicken is usually served with a dipping sauce that is bottled and sold commercially under various brands, and it is a real treat. So, having the breast meat just ‘not moist’ would I thought go well with the sauce. Of course, leg meat remains moist even so, but that is OK.

We ate it with jasmine rice and raw vegetables, with the dipping sauce of course.

I ate most of it with a knife and fork, but as with all good grilled or roasted chicken, at a certain point you are better off using your fingers, which is what I did. I enjoyed it very much, and pretty much picked the bones clean.

And the crying dogs? Apparently in Thailand when you pick the bones clean and leave no meat for the dogs, some people call it “making the dogs cry”.

Having had no success with finding Black Pomfret in the supermarkets last week, we decided to go to one of the premier fresh markets in Bangkok this week, the Or Tor Kor market.

We found 2 stalls with Black Pomfret. The one we patronised was the one we have been buying crabs and prawns from for 6 or 7 years now. The lady recognised us as usual, and was pretty helpful.

The Black Pomfret she had on display was large enough for a family of 4, too large for the 2 of us. She dug into the ice and found a slighly smaller one. She opened up the gill cover to show us how fresh it was, the colour being a very nice deep red. She also ran a fingernail down one of the gills, and blood came out pretty readily, another sign of real freshness she said. We ended up buying the smaller one, which weighed in at 700 grams (25 ozs).

Left: 2 Black Pomfret, the smaller one above.

We took the opportunity to browse whatever else she had for sale. Some photos below.

Left: A tray of Silver Pomfret. Every stall had these in abundance, including larger specimens.

She had assorted fish for sale, of pretty good quality. Unfortunately, there were no Spanish Mackerel for sale at any of the stalls in the market.

A couple of mud crabs. These are usually sold live, so the fact that they were on ice probably meant that they had died. There were no live Blue Crabs available at all, the only ones being on ice, so any thoughts I had about cooking my signature crab curry went out the window.

A tank of live prawns (shrimp), the type that I usually buy for a barbecue. They go great with Thai seafood dipping sauce. I’m hungry just thinking of this.

These clams were very much alive, and you’d see them squirting up water every so often. I only had my point and shoot, so I didn’t try to get a photo of that happening.

 A tray of mussels, with some mud crabs at upper left. There is a great Thai starter which has steamed clams and mussels, in a broth of lemongrass, basil, shallots, kaffir lime leaves and a cup of wine. Haven’t done this in ages, so the next time we go there, it would make a nice starter for a barbecue!

After browsing her stall, we took the opportunity to buy some Thai Garlic, as this is not always available in the supermarkets.

As we were leaving, we saw some Rose Apples (Chompoo in Thai) of pretty outstanding quality, so we bought some as well.

Or Tor Kor market is not the cheapest market by any means, but it does have a reputation for good quality produce.

So, an interesting trip and I cooked a Black Pomfret Curry that night. One of my better efforts I was told, motivated no doubt by how much effort it took to get the fish. 

Some years back, I was in an office canteen that had all sorts of noodles on offer, including one that had fish slices. It was incredibly popular with the staff in the building, but over time, I had forgotten about it. Somehow, when I decided to cook noodles the other day, this dish sprang to mind. So, I postponed the noodles by a day and we went out the next evening to buy some fish fillets, along with other stuff of course. High fuel prices make a trip out for 1 optional item a useless extravagance.

We had intended to buy grouper, but the prices were ridiculously high, so we ended up getting seabass.

I cut the fillet into smaller slices, then fried them with minced garlic, sliced shallots and 1 bird chilli (prik khi nu). Took out the fish, leaving behind the garlic, shallots and chilli.

I then added my gourmet quality pork stock to the pan, and brought it to a boil.

Yes, it is gourmet quality. Firstly, it is prepared in a style that the commercial vendors do not do any more, as it takes too long. Secondly, I chill it overnight, and then de-fat it. The vendors never did that, nor are they likely to ever do it in this day and age. What you end up with is a sweet, rich stock that is incredibly light. I digress; you can read all the details on my home page this Friday.

I also sautéed sliced shiitake mushrooms in soy sauce and oyster sauce in order to have something with a distinctly different flavour in the dish.

Anyway, once the stock was ready, it was a simple matter of blanching the bean sprouts and egg noodles, then adding the fish slices to the stock to re-heat them, and dishing out.

I made large portions, and it was a nice 1 dish dinner.

There are probably as many Thai Grilled Chicken recipes as there are shops selling this food. Actually, probably even more. So if you are starting from a recipe, it does not hurt to look at more than one, and be willing to experiment.

I did just that last night and it turned out to be pretty nice. A couple of weeks ago I was at the Villa Supermarket on Soi Thong Lo in Bangkok, and I can across this pack of 2 chicken legs, that instantly caught my eye - it must have been a pretty big chicken! Checked a bit and there were 2 packs similarly sized, so bought both of them.

Anyway, back to the food. One recipe calls for marinating in coriander root, lemongrass, ginger, pepper, curry powder (???), sugar and enough light soya sauce to drown anything. The other calls for coriander root, garlic, sugar and a reaonable amount of light soya sauce. Bit bland.

So, I combined the 2, and had coriander root, ginger, lemongrass, garlic, pepper, sugar and a reasonable amount of soya sauce. Plus I added a tablespoon of oil into the marinade to be safe. Used a fork to stick many holes into the still slightly frosty chicken leg - that way the hole remains open as the tissue does not spring back right away. Put the legs plus marinade into a large ziploc, rubbed it well in and held in the fridge for 6 hours.

Grilling took about 5 minutes longer than normal - these were big legs.

Taste was great. We had it with some left over Malaysian style chilli paste that I had made for another recipe last weekend, raw vegetables (tomatoes, carrots and cabbage), and steamed rice. It tasted so good we forgot about the Thai style sweet sauce that usually goes with this.

Comment as the bones were being picked clean - “Wow, I can get the taste all the way down to the bone”.

That was a nice meal.