Grilled Chicken Thighs: Boneless Thigh Recipe for a Grill Pan
Today I'm cooking grilled chicken thighs. For people living in a modern city, probably the favourite way to spend time with the family is to get out of town and into the countryside. It would be naive to think the point of the trip is to admire nature, listen to the birds singing and the frogs croaking (my wife simply adores that), or, as I like to do, walk barefoot through the dew. All of that is on the programme, but closer to the end of the list. At the top of the list is shashlik. For us, the idea of “shashlik” goes far beyond the recipe for that wonderful Caucasian dish. As some humorists put it, in our language the word “shashlik” is not a dish but an excuse. But let's talk about cooking instead.
The idea of shashlik usually comes down to grilling. Most often grilling means a way of cooking food, although the same word is used for the device you cook on.
The simplest grill is a direct one, where glowing coals spread their heat evenly over a grate set above them. The food cooks in dry heat. A grill heated by something other than coals, an electric one for example, heats the grate and the food on it with hot elements. I have had two different electric grills at home. In the first one, which I brought from Bulgaria, the heating elements were inside the grate itself, so you ended up with a “table” heated to the right temperature. The second design was simpler: a heater with a grate above it. Both designs are handy and do the job. The one drawback is that this is rather bulky equipment.
Not long ago we started using a square pan with a heavy, ridged base. For a small kitchen it is convenient and lets you cook without spending much time. Although, naturally, food cooked on the stove is very different from food cooked over coals, with smoke.
A grill pan is a remarkable piece of kitchen equipment in general. Once you get used to it, you can quite soon switch to cooking with very little fat, which matters even for perfectly healthy people. Having tried several different grill pans, I noticed something interesting. For everyday use, the simplest and cheapest pan is the right one. No fashionable coatings, no mahogany handles, no inserts or indicators of any kind, which more often than not are marketing nonsense. The ideal is an inexpensive pan that you can retire once a year, which is exactly what we do.
Nothing could be easier than quickly cooking chicken breast for lunch or, as I prefer, chicken thighs. Minced chicken thigh makes very tasty and tender patties. For a pleasant evening you can make fried chicken legs in a grape sauce. Let me share a simple home recipe: grilled chicken thighs cooked in a grill pan.
Ingredients
2 servings
- Chicken thighs (boneless thigh meat) 2
- Olive oil 1 tsp
- Spices: curry powder, salt to taste
- Lemon, vegetables, fresh herbs for garnish
Step-by-step recipe
- When people say “chicken thighs”, they mean the meaty part from the knee joint to the body, not the whole leg. I'm not a big fan of white chicken meat, but chicken thighs I do like. How do you cook chicken thighs? I remember that my recipe for oven-baked chicken thighs with pineapple and cheese went down well with many people precisely because it uses thigh rather than breast. The dish turns out far more tender.
- For dinner, one piece of meat per person is enough, given that there are also vegetables and, as usual, a side dish, and plenty of it. Then again, I don't like to eat a lot at dinner. But if you see it differently, cook yourself two thighs, or five.
- Of course, the chicken thighs need to be thawed if they have been in the freezer. These days, though, chilled products that have never been frozen are easy to find. At least, that is what the producers swear.
- Carefully trim the skin and any remaining fat off the thighs. Thoroughly remove the connective tissue as well; it looks like a thin film. With a sharp knife, cut out the bone and the joint cartilage. You should end up with a rectangular piece of dark chicken meat. If necessary, you can lightly pound the meat in the thick spots so that it cooks through better. But only lightly, and preferably not with a meat mallet but with the handle of a knife. Be careful here, because chicken meat is very tender. Grilled chicken thighs are a refined dish.
- Place the prepared chicken thighs on a plate, with the side where the skin was facing down. Salt them and sprinkle with curry powder to taste. Chicken with curry is always delicious. Especially if the curry is a good one.
- Curry is a dish typical of Indian cuisine, and also the leaves of a tree with poisonous fruit. For us, curry is a seasoning: a spice blend with a rather complex composition. Curry is among the most widespread spice blends in the world, alongside khmeli suneli, adjika, garam masala, wuxiangfen (the Chinese five-spice blend) and others.
- Heat the grill. If you have a charcoal grill, and I even envy you, light it. If you are cooking in the kitchen, put your grill pan on the heat. It heats up quickly.
- Brush the prepared chicken thighs with a little olive oil. In principle any vegetable oil will do, but olive oil adds its own note of flavour to the dish. Lay the chicken thighs on the hot ridged pan, spiced side up.
- It is worth shifting the pieces of meat a little, by a couple of centimetres, so that they don't stick to the pan in the first moments. Cook for 4.5-5 minutes. If you want a neat crosshatch pattern rather than stripes, after 3 minutes turn the pieces of meat to a different angle to the ridges on the base. Then cook the chicken thighs for the remaining time.
- Turn the chicken thighs over with a spatula and cook for another 4 minutes. The time is a little shorter because the meat has already warmed through. Besides, the spices shouldn't be fried for long. The cooking time for the second side can perhaps be cut further, depending on how things look.
- Place the cooked chicken thighs on plates. As a side, I recommend slicing some fresh vegetables: cucumber, tomato, radish. Add a little fresh greenery too. And be sure to add a slice of lemon.
- Serve the grilled chicken thighs straight away, while the meat is still hot. As a side dish, apart from the usual mashed potatoes, I can recommend rice with vegetables.
| Yield: | 2 servings |
| Calories: | 227 |
| Prep: | 20 mins |
| Cook: | 10 mins |
| Total: | 30 mins |
| Category: | Main Dishes |
| Cuisine: | European |
| Rating: |
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4.9
(10)
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