Spicy Chicken with Bitter Sweet Sauce Surprise

Tomas O cillin -

This one has been a work in progress, particularly on the sauce so I tried it twice over so far; once on meat balls and chicken wings and once on chicken thighs. I might even try it on a whole chicken next!

The idea is simple; use a good spicy rub with lots of heat, enough to make you say wowser! But counterbalance the heat with a bitter-sweet sauce.

First off, the rub!

There’s plenty of spicy rubs out there one could purchase fully mixed, but where’s the fun in that? For the point of experimentation and to help me learn about the flavours, I’ve been mixing up my rubs from scratch.  This one is pretty simple: equal measures of each, except double down on the Cayenne. So say 15ml (1 tbsp) of each. I also added crushed chillies but these are hot, hot, hot, so much less of these…

  • Salt
  • Peppercorns crushed
  • Galic granules
  • Onion granules
  • Paprika
  • Cayenne x 2
  • Thyme
  • Rosemary
  • Oregano
  • Chillies crushed (2.5ml)


Further Marination

When I prepared the thighs, I decided to add a little more marination, so I squeezed an orange and chopped some fresh garlic. To be honest, I didn’t know the orange was going to be a Blood Orange, but that’s neither here nor there.

  • Whole orange, squeezed
  • Fresh chopped garlic


I gave the chicken a good drizzling with the olive oil; got it nice and soaked in the stuff. This also helps to get the rub to stick to the meat. I wasn’t shy with the rub either. I covered the meat liberally. I then sneezed the orange over my thighs and added the chopped garlic and let it season over night.

The Bitter-Sweet Sauce

The sauce prep is the work in progress. The recipe I was using asked for ketchup and a lot of brown sugar. Now, I’m not much of a sweet tooth and I like using my natural ingredients as much as possible, so second time round I swapped out the ketchup for fresh chopped tomatoes and I doubled down on the honey instead of using sugar, and let me just say, this worked just yum fine!

Eh, yeah, measurements… a bit of this and a bit of that. Play it by ear, a work in progress open to experimentation, but here are the ingredients:

  • 6 chopped tomatoes
  • A squeezed lemmon for zing
  • Dash of apple cider vinegar for zang
  • Mustard for heat. Several spoonfuls
  • Nice strong squeeze of honey for sweetness
  • Splash of onion and garlic granules
  • As much crushed chilly as you dare! (Remember the sauce is to off-set the heat of the rub so don't go over the top)
  • And about a cup full of cheap bourbon for Whoo-yea!


The sauce I simmered over the grill (lid off the BBQ) until it got to heat and started bubbling. Make sure not to let it boil over though as the bourbon has the potential to flame up like a fireball if it licks the open flame! When I had it simmering I moved it off the heat to one side, and added the chicken. From this point on, everything was done by indirect cooking (not cooking directly over the flame) with the lid on over the BBQ. I’m sure it would be fine to just grill the lot right from the start but I find this can burn away a lot of the rub. There’s always time close to the end of the cook to place the chicken cuts over the grill when the heat has died down a little if one wants those charred grill lines on their meat. By indirect cooking, it also allowed me to baste the chicken with the bitter-sweet sauce a number of times throughout the cook.

Also, don’t forget to throw a few wood chips into the coals to get a smokey flavour. Since it's a relatively quick cook (about a half-hour at 190C) the meat shouldn't get too over powered by the smoke flavour; nevertheless I used apple wood chips as the smoke from fruit trees tend to be more complementary (not overpowering) on poultry than heavier woods like oak.


This is how my chicken and meatballs turned out with the ketchup sauce (first attempt).

And below is one of the chicken thighs on a plate, made with the chopped tomato sauce (second attempt)… Now onto larger, more ambitious cooks, like a whole chicken maybe :P