Roasted Jidori Chicken by Chef Robert Conaway & aGreatChef.com

Menu highlights is a new feature that I am going to start doing on occasion. Highlighting items off our breakfast, lunch, dinner and small plates menu’s, offering you a bit more of a description that can be placed on our menu or that our server’s can remember. This is an opportunity lost to most chef’s, a way to truly describe one’s creations and the ingredients behind it.

I have chosen to start this off by focusing on my Jidori Chicken dish, for no other reason than I like this image and I am hungry from some poultry. My needs aside, this is a very tasty and popular dish with roots in southeast Asia.

Jidori chicken is a breed of chicken that in Japanese means “chicken of the earth”. It was bred to be a tastier kind of bird and was brought into the limelight by chef’s practicing Asian fusion cuisine in LA and SF 15+ years ago. It tends to be a smaller chicken, but offers up more flavor and is not laden with hormones or other chemicals.

Our Jidori chicken starts off with an Issan or eastern Thai chicken marinade. This marinade enhances the flavor of the chicken without adding unnecessary flavors and keeps it very moist. Left to rest for a couple of hours the chicken is roasted daily prior to each service. I picked up this marinade when visiting the village of one of my Thai instructors while I was studying in Thailand almost 10 years ago. Deep in the heart of Issan, the village was 30 miles from the Lao border. I was lucky enough to sleep in a traditional Thai house, harvest rice and wander through a village no foreigners had been to since the ’60’s (see bike photo to the left). Sitting at a small roadside stand, I tasted this chicken and could never forget the taste and the warmth of fall in Thailand.

On our dinner menu, I pair this with our locally grown mashed potatoes, pan roased haricot verts (that’s green beans in French ;)), roasted whole garlic cloves and shallots and a wonderful au jus sauce. This dish was extremely popular during the heat of summer and I expect that it will only gain in it’s popularity as the weather cools and the seasons change.

This dish brings together the subtle flavors of southeast Asia and locally grown ingredients in a tasteful and visually stimulating manner. Honestly, I love this dish and I hope you do to.

Best,

chefRob