When I started my blog I was more interested in the eating aspect of food than cooking. In fact I swore I wouldn’t set foot into the kitchen because I thought it was boring and most importantly difficult. However a lot of that has changed thanks to an extremely fussy and selective palette. Which means I get bored of eating the same thing and constantly crave new flavours and dishes. No one is going to indulge me which led to me starting my experiments in the kitchen to please my selective taste buds and before I knew it, I was cooking every day.
What excites me is trying to create a new recipe with unusual ingredients and trying to create new flavours. I’m no pro at this, to be honest there are other bloggers that are far more creative than me but my goals are to invent easy recipes that don’t take forever to make, have simple easy to follow steps and most importantly have easily available ingredients that are affordable. There is nothing more annoying that going through beautiful cookbooks or recipes online that ask for exotic ingredients or some that I have to pay a hefty sum for. I like to cook with things I find in my pantry or that can hop skip and jump to my local grocer and get them.
Chicken is a simple enough protein that I cook often enough. It’s easy to clean ( which is a task for me with some meats or fish ) it’s not outrageously expensive and I have a couple of great quick fix chicken recipes ( check the recipe section on the blog for more inspiration ). In a quest to try something different I raided my pantry to see what ingredients I could use to make myself a sexy little chicken dish. This is when I came up with a really good and easy recipe for a Coffee inspired Roast Chicken.
Coffee isn’t an ingredient I use a lot because either it’s cold coffee or some sort of coffee dessert and I cook more savory than sweet generally. What started out as a weird idea initially started to grow on me because if you think about it, there are hardly any savory recipes with coffee and it’s a beautifully intense flavour. Maybe this works better with red meat but a trial test with chicken proved it to be one tasty treat and suddenly out of nowhere I came up with the PERFECT Coffee Rub ( Marinade ) for chicken. After a couple of experiments ( lots of coffee and chickens later ) I managed to get the correct flavour balance and I give you my specially recipe for a BRU GOLD Coffee Rub Roasted Chicken. I hope you enjoy this one 🙂
Ingredients –
2 – 4 Chicken Pieces ( I’ve used boneless breast pieces )
3 – 4 tablespoons Bru Gold coffee
1 teaspoon Cajun spice ( this is optional you don’t have to add it )
Garlic ( a couple of cloves to throw in the pan or you can add 1 teaspoon garlic powder )
1 teaspoon Pepper
1/2 teaspoon Salt
Oil ( I can say 2 – 3 tablespoons but it might need more )
2 teaspoon Mustard ( I’ve used whole grain you can use any, even Kasundi )
1 teaspoon Chili powder
1/2 teaspoon Thyme
1/2 teaspoon Rosemary
Juice of 1 of even half a Lime
I/2 teaspoon Cumin powder
1/2 teaspoon Coriander powder
1 teaspoon Brown Sugar ( you can use both honey and sugar or just honey it’s your choice )
2 teaspoon Honey
2 teaspoon Cinnamon
Method
1.Take the chicken and make about 2-3 incisions in the flesh. The incisions are only so the marinade seeps inside
2.In a large bowl first mix all the dry ingredients together and then add the honey and oil. The oil will help to make it into a liquid like paste.
(Sometimes the oil doesn’t make it into a paste so you might need to add a bit of water but please be careful and add very little at a time because it needs to be a paste and not complete liquid. Otherwise it will not coat the chicken well. )
3.Use your hands and rub the chicken generously into this special marinade and make sure every piece is coated well. Try and get some of the marinade to seep inside those incisions you’ve made.
4.Pre heat your oven for 10 mins so that it is nice and warm when the chicken goes in.
5.Place the chicken on a baking tray and add in your cloves of garlic ( if you added garlic powder to the marinade you can skip this part ) and cook it in the oven for exactly 20 mins at 180 degrees Celsius.
6.Serve hot with an accompaniment of my signature smashed potatoes ( the recipe is on the blog in the snacks section under recipes ) or even a side salad of your choice.
7.In case you want to cook the potatoes and chicken together. I’d suggest you prep the potatoes first and give them a 10 -15 minute head start in the oven and then add your chicken. The potatoes take slightly longer to cook as explained in the recipe.
Disclaimer : This post was done in association with BRU Gold Coffee. As always thoughts opinions and recipes are my own.
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Sounds like an interesting combination of flavours! Would love to try it out and see for myself.
Wow! Who knew coffee could be so versatile!
Our Triple T was not fond of cooking
But then she got fed up of just looking
She got down to it
And made a fine fit
Of chicken with coffee hooking!